Storm brings fresh snow, frustration

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This article was published 05/04/2023 (929 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The two Winnipeg post-secondary students figured they were going to be late for afternoon classes Wednesday when they saw the volume of snow that had accumulated on Good Street in front of their apartment building — and on Leo Paul’s new car.

“It’s my first time doing this,” said Paul, 24, as he brushed the snow from the recently purchased Kia Forte, his first car in Canada, while his roommate, Gopal Dinesh, 21, stood by laughing.

The international students came to Winnipeg from India to study heavy duty mechanics about three years ago, and although they’re getting used to the weather, they didn’t expect such a snow dump in early April.

“In April, it’s not so good, this much snow,” said Paul. “I thought it would be spring, but it’s not going to be spring anytime soon.”

In his home state of Kerala, it was about 28 C on Wednesday.

“Except for the winter, I prefer Canada,” he said.

Cameron Klassen, 16, was waiting for a morning bus near the Health Sciences Centre, having made his way by Transit from the Meadows West neighbourhood for an orthodontist appointment.

“I’m not too excited. But once I get home, I’ll just warm up — it’ll be fine,” he said of the commute. “It’s supposed to be spring right now.”

He planned to shovel the walk once he made it back home to his parent’s house.

On Portage Avenue, near Memorial Boulevard, Stella’s Cafe and Bakery had a sandwich board set up on the sidewalk.

“Now hiring! For patio season,” it proclaimed, as bundled pedestrians trudged past, battling the wind.

Down the road, the owner of a Portage Avenue pizza shop that caters to University of Winnipeg students said she was expecting the sidewalk to have been plowed by the time she came in around 10 a.m.

“It was like piles of snow, couldn’t even open my door because it was piled. We had to push in,” said Ramandeep Brar, owner of the Freshslice Pizza franchise.

The wind had pushed more than a foot of snow against the door, heavy and hard to shovel out, she said. “Even if they come, they only do one plow, so the snow is still on both sides — I still have to go out and do the shovelling.”

The small business owner had just returned from a trip to visit family in India.

“It was like 28 C — it’s shocking for me right now,” Brar said with a laugh. “I thought by the time we came (back) it was going to be all clear.”

She went out to clear more snow from the sidewalk at about 12:30 p.m. “I think I have to do it one more time,” Brar said.

Later in the afternoon, a friend asked 25-year-old Chris Stevenson to go for a beer run to a downtown vendor from his Carlton Street apartment near Assiniboine Avenue.

He got about halfway up the block’s snow-laden sidewalk on his mountain bike before he gave up in frustration, pushing his ride back to the apartment, so he could set back out on foot.

If he had realized it had snowed as much as it had, he wouldn’t have agreed to the errand, Stevenson said.

“I went to sleep and it looked like I could bike — then I woke up and it looked like this,” he said, gesturing to the piles of snow on the boulevard and the unplowed sidewalk.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera