Snow Hurricanes

The night of Thursday, April 8th 2010 won't, but should, go down in history as yet another spring storm innovation in Edmonton. We had something that could charitably be referred to as an ice hurricane. The actual snowfall was probably an inch -- maybe two. The Weather Network shows no accumulation on Thursday and only 4mm on Friday. It was awfully hard to record, however. The west side of my house where my patio doors are located had almost a foot of snow drifted tight up against them: drifts that finally disappeared in full on Saturday afternoon. This had something to do with the 90 km/hr winds, perhaps.

Power was out in various places in the province: one of my cousins was without power for roughly 15 hours, as the winds blew down the power lines in their remote corner of the province and affected exactly two houses (ie. not the highest priority for their REA, who was battered from all corners). The TransCanada was shut down, and a friend coming down from Grande Prairie left on a perfectly sunny yet chilly afternoon and at Whitecourt found that the front of the truck was no longer visible through the blowing snow.

While I tried holding on valiently, on Friday morning at about 1am I gave up and turned on my furnace. I was thinking today that it had been off for quite some time. In fact, I ended up whipping up a quick bar graph showing my winter furnace use:

A level of "0" means the furnace was never on for the entire month, "0.5" means it was on for half the month or less, and "1" means it was on for the entire month or less (typically pretty damned close to 30 days).

Another friend of mine is in Mexico this week. Damn you!