City of Saskatoon tackles cleanup of unexpected snow dump

Watch above: Roughly 30 centimetres of snow fell in Saskatoon over a 24-hour period, leaving city officials scrambling to keep up with calls and reports of power outages. Amber Rockliffe reports on how crews are tackling the late-season snow dump.

SASKATOON – About 30 centimetres of snow fell over a 24-hour period, leaving city officials scrambling to keep up with calls and reports of power outages.

“We weren’t really expecting it. The weather didn’t really give us too much warning,” explained Ray Unrau,the director of Saskatoon emergency management.

“We issued a level two EOC alert early this morning, that we use to get all the directors and the affected organizations within the city to submit their assessment forms and then participate in a teleconference to give us an overall situation assessment.”

Power in 20 west side neighbourhoods went down Saturday afternoon, affecting traffic lights, the landfill, the city’s website and telephone servers.

While the exact cause of the outages isn’t known, the city said several weather-related factors likely tripped the feed from the main power station.

On Sunday morning, the power went down again in seven neighbourhoods.

“We had those all restored here now by noon – most of it being branches that are resting on the lines, or pulling on lines, and we had a couple places where lines were actually broken and down on the groun,” explained Brendan Lemke, with Saskatoon Light and Power.

Across Saskatoon, trees have been buckling from the weight of the wet snow, losing branches, and snapping in half.

“As of now, there were nine calls – eight of them were fairly significant tree failures,” explained the city’s Parks Director Darren Crilly.

Crilly explained that red ‘storm damage assessment’ notices are being posted around the city.

“If citizens notice the sign on a city tree, that means the tree has been inspected, and our crews will be back to deal with the situation.”

On Sunday, the city had twelve contractor graders and four public works graders working on priority streets, with two speed plows on Circle Drive.

Temperatures are expected to drop below zero overnight, and the city said rutting could form, but it won’t last.

“It may have a little bit of an impact on the residential streets because we won’t be able to get to those to do any grading,” explained the city’s public works director Pat Hyde.

READ MORE: Two Saskatoon police events cancelled due to snow