I was thinking I could call this column something like, "Storms I have known " or something equally pretentious, but I don't know how well that would go over.
Our experience here in the southeast with the so-called "weather bomb" was enough to make life interesting for a few days in the last week. Really, though, the storm was a rude reminder that there is a winter coming, rumbling slowly down the tracks with the weight and inevitability of a freight train.
The storm was bad enough to cause some people to have to stay overnight in the city where they could, including a team that slept in the Comp Cafetorium, and one person I heard of who had to sleep in their car because there were no hotel-motel rooms to be had.
Anyone who's lived for any length of time in Canada has seen worse, of course; if there's one constant I've learned, it's that no matter how bad it gets, it can always be worse (or has been worse).
Here in Weyburn about a decade or more ago there was quite a storm that produced snowdrifts three-four feet high in the middle of the street, and up on Â鶹ÊÓƵ Hill, there were drifts up at 10th Avenue that were considerably larger than that. After a few hours, there was one lane cut into a drift, but other streets, like Confederation Drive, remained largely impassable for a couple days.
It's been a few years since we've seen a storm like that here; had this storm arrived in mid-January instead of now, you can be sure it would've been quite a bit worse than it was.
One of the worst storms I can remember occurred when I lived in central Alberta; it started as rain one night in May, and within a few hours the thick, heavy wet snow had accumulated enough I almost couldn't open our front door. The storm proceeded to keep snowing like that all day, so by the end of the day there were several feet of snow, and some rather high, huge drifts.
It took a few days for us to deal with that storm, but in my mind, that was a storm of near-legendary status - although not as bad as the blizzard of '47 which hit here and literally buried train locomotives. From the stories I read about that storm, that was legendary. I wonder how well we today would deal with such a huge amount of snowfall; those people at that time certainly had their work cut out for them.
For us today, warmer temps arrived within days and there was soon little evidence left of the slipping and sliding we did on Oct. 26-27-28. But don't worry, Old Man Winter is just warming up (pardon the pun )
