Newfoundland native Lola Parsons battened down the hatches in advance of last week’s snowstorm that swept through Eastern Canada.
What she forgot to secure, however, was one of the windows on her a car that she had left open by mistake — an error that led to the latest viral video emerging as a product of the storm.
In an interview with Global News, Parsons said she had rolled down her passenger window to see out of her car after having dirtied the windows while driving on the muddy, slush-covered highway.
She parked her car down the driveway from her friend Gail Soper’s home in Conception Bay, where she was staying for the weekend. Parsons was only able to see her car after having ventured out to check it on Saturday — two days after she first left it there.
“We went around to the passenger side of my car and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, the window’s gone,’ and then Gail’s like, ‘Don’t touch anything, maybe somebody broke into your car,’ and she started taking pictures for insurance purposes,” said Parsons.
“And then I was like, ‘No, nobody could break into the car, it was a storm last night. Nobody was trying to break into people’s cars. The wind must’ve blew it out because the winds were really high.'”
Figures from Environment Canada paint a picture of how severe Newfoundland’s historic blizzard really was. Record-breaking snowfall was measured just outside of St. John’s, with the city of Mount Pearl and the town of Paradise being buried with 93 and 91 centimetres of snow, respectively.
Powerful winds also buffeted the province, with the strongest gust of wind from the storm recorded as 171 km/h just off Fortune Bay on Green Island.
“So we look in the car and we start taking the snow out and we’re like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s no glass,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, no, you know what I did? I left the window down,’ and then we both started hysterically laughing,” said Parsons.
“And then Gail’s like, ‘I need to get this on Snapchat. I need to take a snap, I need to take a video.’ So we did a video. And then after that, it just went crazy. And then my son saw it and he put it on Twitter and Twitter just blew up.”
The video of Parsons and her car, which was posted on Twitter by her son Saturday, has been viewed over 390,000 times as of 9:30 p.m. on Monday.
As for her snow-infused car, Parsons said that luckily for her, it came out of the ordeal in perfect condition.
“There was a lot of snow in the car. It took me about an hour to get it all out because the wind had, like, whipped it around in the car and it was packed tight under the seats,” said Parsons.
“So I got it all out of the car as much as I could and I turned the car on, the heater on, and I put the heated seats on and left the car running for an hour and my car is sparkly clean. There was no electrical damage because it was too cold for the snow to melt.”
— With files from Kerri Breen