It might be spring but old man winter clearly isn't going away without a fight.
Estevan, and a large portion of southeast Saskatchewan, was hit by a fierce spring storm that dumped over 30 centimetres of heavy, wet snow on the area Saturday. That dense snow ensnarled traffic and left many in the region without power for a significant amount of time as the high winds that accompanied the storm knocked over a number of power poles.
After a rainy, but otherwise pleasant Friday, the weather took a turn for the worse shortly after midnight on Saturday when the rain gave way to the wet snow and high winds. Within hours many homes in the Estevan, Torquay, Benson and Lampman areas were without power while others had their service intermittently disrupted throughout the night and day.
SaskPower spokesman James Parker said as of Monday, the majority of homes in the area had their power restored although he noted there were some areas around Torquay that were still waiting for their service to be restored.
Parker said the winds, which according to Environment Canada were gusting as high as 80 kilometres an hour, knocked down poles and damaged conductors.
"There were more than 1,000 customers off for a time because of the storm on Saturday," said Parker.
"Estevan is back and there are some oilfield customers near Midale that will be restored (Monday) afternoon."
Parker added SaskPower line crews were ready to roll Saturday morning but were unable to get on the roads as the snow and wind continued to pelt the city.
"A lot of the highways had travel advisories. That was the issue on Saturday and it was very frustrating for our crews; they wanted to get to work but they couldn't because they couldn't travel," said Parker who noted that SaskPower received more than 17,000 calls to their outage centre Saturday and Sunday.
"We had about 200 people working on this. We brought in SaskPower crews from other areas, we brought in private contractors which we do often. We had special equipment to help us with this but the main problem was it doesn't matter how many people you have, if you can't travel, you are not going to fix the problems."
One of the groups handling the travel side of the storm was the City of Estevan. City manager Jim Puffalt said crews were out by 7 a.m. Saturday with a focus on the north end as the wind created a number of drifts in that region of Estevan.
"With that wind, the northwest section of the city was blowing in really bad," said Puffalt. "We worked all day until late in the evening just trying to keep things open but once that wind died down we got a little bit more results. Sunday we worked about eight hours to clean up some of the main streets. (The snow) melted off pretty quick."
Like pretty much else in the area, Puffalt said they were caught off guard by the magnitude of the storm but he was happy with how their crews responded.
"We were expecting to need the snow wings on the grader or the snowblower on the plough still. I thought we had a really good response, our people worked really long hours and hard and we thank them because it wasn't a fun weekend for them."
Although a few vehicles were able to make their way around the city, a number got stuck in the many snowdrifts and were abandoned by their owners.
Other city residents had to deal with issues such as downed trees as the combination of wet snow and wind toppled some trees throughout Estevan. Fortunately there have been no injuries or major accidents reported as part of the blizzard.
