Much of southern and central Saskatchewan was blanked in rain and snow on Sunday, with several communities in the province’s east central region losing power.
Dan Fulton, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, says the heavy precipitation was the result of two competing storm fronts colliding.
“It was a fairly powerful low pressure system moving from Montana and then kind of tracked the centre of it along the Manitoba, Saskatchewan border,” he said.
“That system brought quite a bit of precipitation with it, initially in the form of rain. But complicating the situation was that a cold front was moving in from Alberta at the same time, bringing much colder air from the west.”
“As those two systems interacted, the rain that much of the province saw earlier in the day actually changed to snow.”
Fulton said communities in Saskatchewan’s east central region, including Hudson Bay and Wynyard, received the most rain at about 45 millimetres.
Larger cities like Saskatoon and Regina both received less than 20 millimetres.
As the rain turned to snow, it was again a broad area of east central Saskatchewan that got the most of it, said Fulton. Between 10 and 15 centimetres of snow landed in both Nipawin and Kamsack.
Even places as far north as Sandy Bay, about 440 kilometres north east of Prince Albert, got heavy snow.
On Monday morning SaskPower reported a large area just east of Melfort and extending to the Manitoba border is without power.
SaskPower spokesperson Scott McGregor said that about 8,500 customers lost power on Sunday. As of Monday morning about 500 people remained without power.
“We expect the vast, vast majority of those customers needs to be restored by the end of today,” said McGregor.
McGregor said the heavy snow, which turned to ice, was responsible for many of the outages.
“It can cause added weight onto the lines to cause the lines to break,” he said. “Whenever you have those very wet storms right around the freezing mark, it’s always a possibility.”
People should not approach any downed power lines if they come across them, McGregor said, because it can be difficult to know if power is still running through them.
“If you do come across a downed line, call our outage centre, and stay back at least 10 metres,” he said.
