Winter wallops southern Manitoba

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This article was published 08/02/2024 (589 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“The winter that wasn’t” descended on southern Manitoba with a vengeance Thursday.

A dump of snow, sleet and rain cut power to thousands of Manitoba Hydro customers and made roads extremely slick as a Colorado low hit the region.

After unseasonable rainfall in Winnipeg Thursday morning, temperatures cooled and the rain turned to snow. The change in weather brought between two and five centimetres of the white stuff, said Justin Shelley, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“This has been quite an abnormally warm winter, so that’s sort of allowing for these conditions to occur over the parts of the province,” Shelley said.

Ice buildup on electrical lines and strong winds sparked outages for more than 6,000 Hydro customers across the province, media relations officer Riley McDonald said.

In Winnipeg, 250 customers — most in the Crestview neighbourhood — were affected, while most outages were in rural areas.

The freezing rain turned roads and highways into sheets of ice, causing collisions in Winnipeg and outside the Perimeter Highway.

Outside the city, slick conditions contributed to a crash between a school bus and a car on Highway 59 near Ile des Chenes, south of the city.

St. Pierre-Jolys RCMP said none of the nine students on the bus, nor its driver, was injured. The driver of the car was sent to hospital with minor injuries.

Headingley Fire Department Chief John Sparham said crews responded to three cars in ditches on the Trans-Canada Highway within 40 minutes Thursday afternoon.

“It’s just rain on top of ice,” he said.

As of Thursday night, all provincial roads and highways remained open but had icy conditions, according to Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure.

So far this month, the daily high has been above freezing. The normal daytime high for this time of year is between -8 C and – 10 C, Shelley said.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca

Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer

Nicole Buffie is a reporter for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom as a multimedia producer in 2023. Read more about Nicole.

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