Warning and preparedness meteorologist with Environment Canada Alysa Pederson said a ‘pretty significant’ amount of records were broken in the province during the frigid snap
After four days of arctic conditions that stretched Alberta’s electricity grid to its limit, the extreme cold warning in place across the province finally came to an end Monday afternoon, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) announced.
The prolonged cold snap had triggered multiple grid alerts and appeals to reduce power consumption — the latest being Monday morning.
Mayor Jyoti Gondek praised Calgarians for paying heed to the alert and reducing electricity consumption.
“I’m incredibly proud of Calgarians for pulling together and reducing their consumption at the peak hours,” she said. “Calgarians did really good work there; they ran their appliances at a different time or they chose not to do a load of laundry, because they knew we needed to be there and for each other.”
Record breaking cold
Warning and preparedness meteorologist with Environment Canada Alysa Pederson said a “pretty significant” amount of records were broken in the province during the frigid snap.
“Since Thursday, we’ve had 92 minimum records broken in four days,” Pederson said. “The coldest day so far seems to be Friday; 44 records were broken on that day, followed by 27 on Saturday and 16 on Sunday.”
She said more records were broken Monday morning, but those were deemed unofficial until midnight. She added that Calgary will get some relief in the coming days.
“We are seeing a slight push of warm air coming in today; we’re getting a system that’s moving into the province tonight . . . into Grande Prairie and central western Alberta,” she said. “But then that same system is going to be redeveloping, moving through Calgary and southern Alberta Tuesday night.”
Pederson said even though Calgary is seeing a reprieve from the extreme cold, temperatures by mid-week will drop to the -20 C range again, with snow starting in the Peace Country on Monday night.
“We’re expecting an increase in cloudy skies tonight and then some snow starting essentially (Tuesday) morning in Calgary,” Pederson said. “Intensifying through the day tomorrow, and then it’s expected to snow pretty much all day Wednesday.”
AMA responded to 22,000 calls between Friday and Sunday
Chad Brinston, manager for fleet performance with the Alberta Motor Association, said there were approximately 32,000 calls for roadside assistance between Tuesday and Sunday.
“Between Friday and Sunday alone, that’s where about 22,000 of those calls were from motorists who were actually requiring a rescue,” he said. “Because of the historic call volume that our dispatch system had been seeing, the website was unfortunately not displaying the accurate times for Calgary, as well as Edmonton.”
The company temporarily ceased providing wait time updates on the website because it was unable to provide accurate information based on the substantial requests it had received.
“I think there’s always a few takeaways that you want to bring back within our core group of operations and to obviously see how you can be better,” he said. “But, obviously, when you encounter moments like this, where you’re seeing the extreme cold temperatures that we’ve been seeing, you have just about every operator that you have in your workforce working overtime and guys are kind of going around the clock, trying to get out and do as many rescues as possible. You take a bit of a sense of pride in making sure that you’re getting out there and rescuing folks.”
