The Blizzard that hit eastern Newfoundland, Canada last Friday was extraordinary. A total of 30″ of snow fell in 24 hours. The storm had hurricane force winds, with a peak gust to 81 mph.
The sun came out after the blizzard and the wind slowly diminished. Look at the picture above. There are cars buried here on the street. City crews said they had plowed through drifts that were 15-feet high.
You can see that transportation came to a standstill. How do you get a fire truck or ambulance through that?
Here’s houses almost totally buried by the snow. One nice thing about the strong wind was that it blew much of the snow off the roofs, so roofs collapsing was not an issue.
Seems like shoveling out of this with a standard shovel would be like trying to get to Seattle by walking.
St. Johns is a city slightly bigger than half the size of Grand Rapids. It has a long history, going back to when John Cabot sailed into the harbor in 1494 on the feast day of St. John the Baptist.
You shovel and shovel…first you have to find the car…then you have to dig it out…then, you have no where to go.
Some folks did try and travel…with skies, snowshoes.
St. Johns is the windiest, cloudiest and foggiest major city in Canada. They get an average of 132″ of snow per winter. February is the coldest month, with an average temperature of 23.2 deg. and August is the warmest with an average temperature of 61.0 deg.
This is what it looked like in the blizzard. The vicious wind blew the snow into gigantic drifts in a short period of time.
Once you get your driveway clear…there’s nowhere to go. The warmest temperature ever in St. Johns was 93 on Aug. 14, 1876 and the coldest was -21 on Feb. 16, 1875. The climate extremes coming in successive years.
Most of the trees are conifers in Newfoundland, with the birch being the most common deciduous tree. Buildings and infrastructure is built to account for intense winds and significant weight loads from heavy snow and periods of freezing rain. This area also can get the very windy remains of tropical storms that move up the east coast of North America.
Someone(s) worked hard to clear this “snow canyon”.