Late on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning, the greater Vancouver area had a snowstorm that brought several centimetres of snow. We were kind of lucky to have the snow fall on the weekend as there were less people on the road and it gave municipalities almost a full day of snow clearing before the Monday morning and evening commutes.
Monday did not bring trouble-free commuting unfortunately, there were some delays for transit and YVR airport was chaotic. It was still miles better than the last snowstorm though. The bridges in the area weren’t closed and I didn’t see vehicles lining up to get home at 3am still.
On Monday evening, after most people had gone home from work, another snowstorm arrived and dumped a huge amount snow all over. I live in a low elevation but even then, it looked like we got 12-14 inches of snow. It was much worse at higher elevations. Roads were either passable to downright dangerous depending on municipality and if you were driving on the highway.
When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I barely saw any vehicles on the road. Amazingly, it stayed like that for the entire day and into the evening. Normally, I start to see rush hour traffic start to back up around 3pm. At 4pm, I struggled to even see more than a handful of cars in any direction. It seemed like everyone just stayed at home on Tuesday. This is a lot of snow for Vancouver and no one is used to this much snow in this city.
What also sucks is that the temperatures are frighteningly cold for Vancouver as well. Cold for Vancouver is normally a degree or two below freezing. As I write this, it is -11 degrees Celsius. This is way outside the normal range of cold for this city. Just to put this in perspective, Montreal and Toronto are currently warmer than Vancouver. Anchorage, Alaska is just as cold as Vancouver, despite being several hundreds of kilometres closer to the north pole.
It’s too cold and there is too much snow on the ground. It’s making it difficult to get anywhere, no matter what form of transportation you’re using, from walking to flying. It all sucks.
As if it wasn’t bad enough, the forecast calls for another 10 to 20 cm of snow to fall from Thursday to Saturday, with freezing rain following the snow. I get the feeling many Christmas plans will be put into doubt but this new storm, possibly even mine.