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City braces for an ugly morning rush hour
Last night’s rush hour went smoothly as motorists hurried home to beat the predicted storm, but it’s unlikely this morning’s will go as well.
Snow from the season’s first major winter storm, mixed with rain, began falling about 6 p.m. and continued through the night in Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec.
When it stops today, there could be as much as 15 centimetres of wet snow on the ground, said Environment Canada — an amount that flirts with the record for the day. On Oct. 28, 1962, the Ottawa airport recorded a fall of 15.5 centimetres.
Dan O’Keefe, the city’s road maintenance manager, yesterday urged drivers to adjust their driving to conditions and show some patience during the morning commute.
“I imagine the morning will be slow,” he said.
About 75 per cent of the city’s snow-clearing equipment is set and ready to go, he said. The rest is still being used to finish jobs from the summer.
Contractors are still busy with construction, although some have committed to helping out as required.
“We have everything ready that we could get our hands on,” Mr. O’Keefe said, adding that preparations had been under way since the city learned of the threat Monday.
Because winds were expected to gust to up to 70 km/h overnight, and leaves remain on many trees in the Ottawa Valley and the Outaouais, there was a danger that overloaded branches would break and take down power lines.
Several hundred Hydro One customers throughout the Valley had lost power by early evening. However, the cause of these outages had mostly not been determined.
As of about 9 p.m., Hydro Ottawa was reporting a number of outages across the city, likely weather related, a spokeswoman said.
Earlier in the day, people were rushing to get snow tires put on their vehicles, buy shovels and salt, or to arrange to have their snow-clearing contractor lined up for an early start.
Some retailers and snow removal companies said yesterday’s business was normal, while others experienced a jump in sales and service requests.
Business at Canadian Tire was “already brisk” by opening, said Glen Anderson, general manager of the Coventry Road store.
“We had 40 customers in a lineup before 7 a.m.,” he said, adding that this could continue through the weekend.
He said his store was stocked with snow equipment and does not expect to sell out in the next few days.
“This is what happens every year when there’s snow,” said Sandro Giaccone, manager of Frisby Tire on Clyde Avenue.
After last year’s near record snowfall, people bought snow tires earlier this year, but waited until the threat of the first snowfall to have them installed, he said.
In that respect, this year is “no different than any other,” he said. “Snow gets everybody moving.”
Retailers predict the supply of snow tires won’t be affected by a new law in Quebec, which requires all vehicles with Quebec license plates to have winter tires.
“It (was) business as usual,” said Chad Messier, manager of Wal-Mart on Bank Street. He said the store was busy, but no more so than most days.
Snowblower dealers, such as the Ottawa Goodtime Centre, were seeing increased sales over the year for the machines, which cost more than $1,000 on average.
“We’ve been selling huge numbers of these things since March 1, each and every day,” said general manager Bryan Thomas. He said snowblower inventory in almost every store in Ottawa is very low because of last year’s winter.
B&T MacFarlane, on Slack Road in Nepean, began selling snowblowers in August.
Salesman Ron Hrycak said he’d never seen that before — the machines usually start moving in late November — but people were motivated to get an early start after last year, which saw a total of 444.1 centimetres of snow.
“Last year kind of opened our eyes to a lot of things,” he said.
Appleseed Snowblowing was so busy yesterday that calls could not not answered personally. A three-minute message informed callers that there would be no snow removal today because most equipment arrives at the end of the month and the crews won’t be organized until Nov. 5.
There is some good news, though. This snowfall should quickly vanish under the warm conditions expected tomorrow and Friday.
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