Albertans got another lesson from Mother Nature that April doesn’t mean the end of winter weather in the province.
Edmonton continued to get hit with snow Saturday, with 2 centimetres expect to fall in the capital region, after 10-15 centimetres fell in the area Friday, according to Global Edmonton meteorologist Jesse Beyer.
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The temperature was at -3 C, with a windchill of -7 C early Saturday morning, and was expected to climb to 3 C Saturday by the afternoon, according to weather special Kevin O’Connell.
ATCO reported outages in northern Alberta from Grande Prairie to Bonnyville and Cold Lake, where up to 30 centimetres of snow was expected and a winter storm warning was still in effect early Saturday afternoon.
The outages were first reported Friday and continued Saturday.
“Due to a combination of things we’ve had snow-laden trees come down onto power lines. We’ve had broken wire due to the accumulation of snow and ice on conductor and things like that,” Brent Kobelka, ATCO distributor of operations director, said.
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Bonnyville resident Steve Potts had his power out for about 28 hours before it came back Saturday afternoon. Before his power was restored, Potts explained the challenges he was facing.
“Now we’re concerned about how long is the power going to be off. Do we start hauling stuff out of our freezer? Do we start draining waterlines? We’re concerned how long it’s going to be done and we can’t really get any answers on that,” Potts said.
ATCO tweeted that excessive snow and cold weather was slowing down power restoration.
“It continues to snow up in the Bonnyville and Cold Lake area. It snowed all night. They had further accumulation and it certainly has impacted our ability to travel the area,” Kobelka said.
“We’ve had a lot of vehicles, crews stuck right on road surfaces. I would imagine not all the roads have been plowed and cleaned.”
There was about 2,000 ATCO customers out of power in Bonnyville, Cold Lake and St. Paul as of Saturday afternoon.
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