A Mighty Blow!

I thought I had seen the best that Mother Nature can do when it comes to blizzards.  Wrong!  This past week Baker Lake experienced one of the worst blizzards in decades!  The blizzard started on Monday and finally tapered off Thursday morning.  Environment Canada advised extreme caution, calling it a "prolonged blizzard event"!  The winds gusted to 120km an hour, the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane.  That, coupled with blowing snow, produced zero visibility conditions. As you'll see later in this blog, being out in zero visibility conditions in a blizzard is no fun.  In fact, it can be deadly.

The blizzard was forecast to start Monday morning. As staff arrived that morning, they were eagerly checking the windows, watching for signs that the blizzard was starting. People commented that everything outside appeared calm, maybe too calm.  It was an eerie silence that was soon to end. By 10am, the winds shifted to the northeast and snow started accumulating on the windows, one of the first signs of a pending blizzard. "It's coming," people were saying, still glued to the windows.  With unexpected speed that even the locals were shocked by, within 15 minutes we were in the middle of one of the largest and most potentially deadly blizzards of the decade.

Schools and offices in Baker Lake scrambled to get children and adults home.  Our office closed right away. I offered to drive four of my co-workers home. As we got into the vehicle, it became apparent that getting people home was going to be an adventure.  If you can imagine driving a vehicle with a white blanket thrown over your windshield, that is what it was like! We rolled down the windows, sticking our heads out, front and back, as we all tried to figure out where the roads were and which way was home!

We decided to drive down the main street.  In other blizzards I had experienced, you could at least see the telephone poles and could use those to help you navigate.  Not so with this massive storm.  We crawled along at 5km an hour.  I was constantly calling out, "What do you see on your side?", "Are we in the middle of the road?"  My four passengers would call back to me, "more to the left", "more to the right".  When nobody responded, I knew that none of us had a clue where we were!

And that became painfully obvious as we ended up axle deep in snow in a back alley.  No one could figure out how we could have gotten off the main road!  One of my co-workers jumped out and walking along the side of the vehicle, directed us back to the main street.  As we came closer to his house, he climbed through waist deep snow to get to his house, snow that had not been there 30 minutes earlier.  The blizzard was definitely in full force!

As I dropped off my final passengers, my co-workers insisted that one of them stay in the vehicle and drive home with me to make sure I would be safe. He would then walk to his place and we'd call each other to make sure we both got home safely.  Until you've been in a blizzard of this magnitude, this type of precaution might seem overdone.  It was not, and I believe it could have been deadly for people trapped out in that weather.  The only saving grace was a moderate windchill, only about -20C.  It could have been much worse.

I heard a story from a man who started walking home from his office that morning just as the storm was starting to unleash her fury.  He said it would normally take him five minutes to walk to his apartment.  It took his co-worker and himself 30 minutes to do so, and much of that time they were on their hands and knees.  The drifts, the blowing snow and the zero-visibility were too much for them to handle.  He said they tried to follow the telephone wires so they would know if they were still on the road, but even this was a challenge, as they were only able to catch occasional glimpses.  He said in retrospect, they were fools to try to walk home.  They should have stayed at work, even if it meant being stranded there for three days.  Quite a statement from a man who has lived in Nunavut for 10 years and has experienced many storms.

Thankfully, the blizzard died down early Thursday morning, however, Mother Nature had one more surprise in store for us.  The metal roof of our office building had been a victim of the storm!  The winds caught one corner of the roof, crumpling it over like the cover of a sardine can.  The windblown roof also took out the chimney, bending it over like a matchstick.  Needless to say, we weren't going to return to work on Thursday.  I've included a picture of our roof below.  Quite a sight.  If it wasn't so cold, I would have thought we were in the tropics, viewing the aftermath of a tropical storm!  Oh well, we'll chock this up to "the best blizzard yet" and a true test of the resiliency of the people, including me, who choose to make Canada's Arctic their home!  Until next time...