SaskatchewanHeavy rain and snow stuck much of southern and central Saskatchewan on Sunday after a rainstorm drifting north from Montana collided with a cold front heading east from Alberta. SaskPower says a large section of the province east of Melfort is without powerKelvington Mobile Health Services says one of its ambulances was caught in a snowbank on Sunday. It says no one was hurt and its patients were picked up by another ambulance. (Kelvington Mobile Health Services)Much of southern and central Saskatchewan was blanked in rain and snow on Sunday, with several communities in the province’s east central region losing power.Danika Prevost was driving home with her boyfriend from a Thanksgiving celebration near Saint Forte to her apartment in Tisdale when they got caught in heavy winds. She said there were times the visibility became so bad, they couldn’t see more than five cars ahead. “It was just blowing and I could feel it on the steering wheel,” said Prevost. The pair arrived to their apartment shortly after 5 p.m. and noticed the lights flickering. Prevost said they didn’t think much of it until a neighbour came by shortly after and advised them to move their trucks. Prevost said the neighbour warned her a large tree in the front yard had been making cracking noises and he was scared it was going to fall. “We moved our trucks and got them out of the way, and like 20-30 minutes later we heard a crack and we looked out the window and one of the branches broke,” she said. Prevost said about an hour later she heard another crack coming from the front yard. She looked out to find an even bigger chunk of the tree had fallen off. Pieces of a large tree in the front yard of a Tisdale apartment broke off during Sunday night’s snowstorm, said Danika Prevost. (Submitted by Danika Prevost )The tree continued to break off piece-by-piece over the course of Sunday night. Prevost said she was worried a piece would eventually break and hit the apartment building. “I’m from the country originally, so being in town for this kind of storm is a little bit different than being out in the countryside. It’s a little bit more close quarters with the trees,” she said.The couple sat surrounded by candles and wrapped in blankets as they feared the thought. Prevost said the power in the apartment building would shut off periodically all Sunday night and into Monday morning. She said there were many times it would be off for up to an hour. “It was starting to get a little bit cold,” she said. On Monday morning, Prevost and her boyfriend woke up to their trucks blanketed in snow and tree branches all over their front yard. Two Saskatchewan storm frontsDan Fulton, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, says the heavy precipitation was the result of two competing storm fronts colliding.“It was a fairly powerful low pressure system moving from Montana and then kind of tracked the centre of it along the Manitoba, Saskatchewan border,” he said. “That system brought quite a bit of precipitation with it, initially in the form of rain. But complicating the situation was that a cold front was moving in from Alberta at the same time, bringing much colder air from the west.”“As those two systems interacted, the rain that much of the province saw earlier in the day actually changed to snow.”Fulton said communities in Saskatchewan’s east central region, including Hudson Bay and Wynyard, received the most rain at about 45 millimetres. Larger cities like Saskatoon and Regina both received less than 20 millimetres.As the rain turned to snow, it was again a broad area of east central Saskatchewan that got the most of it, said Fulton. Between 10 and 15 centimetres of snow landed in both Nipawin and Kamsack.Even places as far north as Sandy Bay, about 440 kilometres north east of Prince Albert, got heavy snow.Over 8,000 people without powerOn Monday morning SaskPower reported a large area just east of Melfort and extending to the Manitoba border is without power.SaskPower spokesperson Scott McGregor said that about 8,500 customers lost power on Sunday. As of Monday morning about 500 people remained without power.”We expect the vast, vast majority of those customers needs to be restored by the end of today,” said McGregor. McGregor said the heavy snow, which turned to ice, was responsible for many of the outages. “It can cause added weight onto the lines to cause the lines to break,” he said. “Whenever you have those very wet storms right around the freezing mark, it’s always a possibility.” People should not approach any downed power lines if they come across them, McGregor said, because it can be difficult to know if power is still running through them.”If you do come across a downed line, call our outage centre, and stay back at least 10 metres,” he said.ABOUT THE AUTHORChris Edwards is a reporter at CBC Saskatchewan. Before entering journalism, he worked in the tech industry.
Heavy storms, power outages across Saskatchewan on Thanksgiving weekend
