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Huge Weekend Storms Blanket Ontario, Quebec and Maritimes

by Rob Walker | March 10, 2008 at 08:30 am

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Ontario, Quebec and the maritimes are digging themselves out of the huge amount of snow dumped down throughout the weekend. At least 15-40 cm of snow dropped on to the Greater Toronto Area over a 36 hour period.
The weekend is a bad time for this sort of blinding, continuous snowfall as many people still attempted to get in and out of the city. At least 1,700 accidents were reported by Sunday evening in and around the GTA.
Rather than brave the horrid weather, and it being the weekend and all, I braved the storm curled up with my girlfriend and playing xbox. Highly recommended over going outside in the raging snow.[q
url="http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=936871"]Toronto
police suspect snowy roads caused a crash in the city's west end that
claimed the life of an 86-year-old man.

Police say he was turning onto a street on Sunday when his small car
was struck by a pickup truck (at Richview and Scarlett Rd.).

Another crash around midnight in the north end sent a 60-year-old man to hospital with critical injuries.

Police say almost 140 people were hurt in some 1,700 collisions during
the weekend storm in the Greater Toronto area, including 526 in
Toronto.[/q]

But if you think you've had a tough time of it, dealing with the 15 to 40 centimetres of snow dumped on the GTA over the weekend, spare a thought for Ottawa, which got more than a half metre of snow, or Quebec, where winds gusting to 133 km/h forced even the police into abandoning their vehicles.
And thousands of homes in eastern Canada remain without light or heat today as hydro workers struggle to recover from the ravages of the storm that swept up from the Ohio Valley on Friday.
The picture's a little brighter in southern Ontario, where most of the GTA has shovelled itself out from under the weekend blanket of snow, and where things are slowly getting back to normal at Pearson airport and on the region's highways.

Environment Canada is warning Canadians not to put away their shovels just yet, as more rough weather is predicted before the end of winter.

"What a winter it has truly been," Environment Canada's senior climatologist David Phillips said Monday as people in Eastern Canada cleaned up from a weekend storm that dumped up to half a metre of snow on some parts.
He warned that the monster storm isn't likely the last big snowfall because 20 per cent of Eastern Canada's snow comes after the first day of March, while 15 per cent of that comes after the first day of spring.
"Don't put away the snow shovel. Don't put away the parka or the balaclava or the booster cables because winter is always slow to leave Canada and spring is reluctant to arrive," he said.

BBC Has a ton of reader pictures up on their site.

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