Tuesday's snowstorm was great if you were spinach, says a local gardener.
City and county residents awoke Tuesday morning to a land caked with about four centimetres of thick, wet snow. Trees snapped. Cars smashed. Taps refused to flow.
But if you were an experienced gardener, said Jim Hole of Hole's Greenhouse & Gardens, it was your lucky day: the broccoli, cauliflower and spinach you'd hopefully put to seed had a nice blanket of slow-release water to help it grow. "The snow's going to melt, it's going to warm up and you're going to see beautiful germination in your garden."
Snow in May? Typical.
Roughly four centimetres of snow fell over much of the Edmonton region Tuesday morning, said Dan Kulak, regional meteorologist for Environment Canada. The snows blanketed much of Alberta and were accompanied by 80-kilometre-an-hour winds down south near Brooks.
"It's normal for the month of May," he said of the snow — Edmonton gets about 3.5 centimetres of it this month in recent years. A moist Pacific air mass moved into Alberta on Monday, causing rain for most of the night. At about 6 a.m., it ran into a cold Arctic wind that turned the rain to snow.
The snow caused staff at the St. Albert Public Works Yard to throw their spring preparations into reverse, according to operations manager Bob Stephen. "We knew it was coming," he said of the snow, but it still hit fast: roads went from clear to ice in about 20 minutes. Lawnmowers came off, brushes and plows went on and crews went out to clear snow. "This would have been no different if it had been November or October."
It also caused a temporary water outage in Sturgeon County. Residents of Cardiff, Summerbrook, Greystone and Northern Lights were without running water after the snowstorm knocked out power to several pumps at about 6 a.m., said county spokesperson Calli Stromner. The water was back on by 11 a.m.
Trees snapped under the weight of snow in St. Albert, with one temporarily blocking Sturgeon Road.
Betty Fraser said she was working at the Michif Institute when a 30-foot-long chunk of willow flopped onto the sidewalk outside. "I just heard a crack and then it came down," said the museum's volunteer co-ordinator. "It's laying across the sidewalk and looks very wintery."
Most St. Albert drivers knew to slow down and drive carefully during the storm, said Cpl. Don Murray of the city's RCMP detachment, but not all of them. "Our front counter has been very busy fielding reports of minor property damage," he said, and officers had already responded to three minor collisions by 9 a.m. "People have got to slow down and give themselves extra space."
Morinville RCMP also had many reports of people running off roads, said Cst. Yelena Avoine. Officers also responded to a three-vehicle pileup on highway 642 just east of Morinville at about 7:45 a.m. "Nobody went to the hospital, luckily."
An undetermined number of people were sent to hospital later that day following a head-on collision on Highway 28 at Cardiff Road. Police believed the weather was a factor in both collisions.
The storm would have been a lot worse for plants if the trees had been in full leaf, Hole noted. "It's much needed moisture," he said of the snow, and it comes with reasonably warm temperatures.
Environment Canada predicts a return to highs of 16 degrees later this week, Kulak said.
