Mathieu Powell.
Writing Impacts.
It was a frosty morning today. As per our usual family routine, I escorted my daughter to school, hand in hand. The difference being today we wore heavy coats and gloves. While we walked, we passed by our neighbour Sue. She was busily scraping her car window with a tiny piece of plastic.
“Oh no, not a credit card?” I asked.
She stopped, looked at me, and then glared at the tiny piece of plastic in her cold hand.
“Actually, it’s my old school ID card,” she said. “You’d think I would know better than not to have a proper scrapper. I’m from Montreal after all.”
“Well”, I quipped. “At least your post-secondary education is finally coming in handy.”
She thought that was as funny as the cold weather. We hurried right along.
Ever since I moved to Vancouver Island, I’ve noticed a preponderance of conversation dedicated to the weather. I suppose it’s only natural given so many people retired here from the prairies where they were directly or peripherally involved in farming. As a farmer, the weather dictates your work and your livelihood. That makes the weather a pretty important topic and I guess talking about it is a hard habit to break.
At the risk of unnecessarily adding yet more to the topic, I decided to scratch my curious itch about Vancouver Island’s weather. I found it interesting enough to share.
This past year was a pretty cold winter across Canada. Some of my friends expressed hope that would translate into a white Christmas. Personally, I’m delighted their whimsy was thwarted and I told them they were idiots.
“Have you forgotten how we had our butts handed to us on a snowdrift in the Blizzard of ’96?” I ask them.
That was the year I had family over through Christmas. We were a camped out in my cramped condo. When they got up to leave on the morning of Sunday, December 29th, their car was completely buried under 65 cm of drifting snow. A perfect visit with an understood departure turned into a grueling gauntlet of strained smiles and eroding patience. It was another four days before they could make their escape and it was a long, long time before they ventured back here.
I recall one magical moment as I stood on the top of a hill looking out over a transformed city of crystalline white. It was the sound that struck me; rather, the complete lack of sound. There were no cars, buses or planes; no engine noise at all. The inner harbour was quiet and still. All I heard were occasional pedestrians cheering each other on as they slogged through the drifts.
The magical moment vanished as the realities of heavy wet snow hit home (literally), and I spent the next two days shovelling off the condo’s huge roof of the condo, rescuing older residents with medical challenges and slogging a quarter mile to forage for food.
Fortunately, we don’t get that cold here and don’t often endure a white Christmas. Victoria’s average daily high and low temperatures in winter are 8 and 4 °C. We’ve had plenty of relatively warm winters – warm enough to support palm trees – but 1999 is the only calendar year on record without a single occurrence of frost. Daily temperatures fall below 0 °C on average only ten nights per year, and the absolute coldest temperature on record was −15.7 °C on December 29, 1968.
Of course, you need more that cold weather to precipitate snow. You also need moisture, and thanks to the rain shadow effect of the Olympic Mountains, Victoria is the driest location on the British Columbia coast, with much lower rainfall than other nearby areas. Victoria’s total annual precipitation is just 608 mm compared with 1000 mm in Cowichan Valley or a whopping 3,671 mm in Port Renfrew. As a matter of fact, we’re second sunniest city in British Columbia. Cranbrook beats us out.
Roughly one third of our winters see no snow, but every few decades Victoria receives very large snowfalls, including the record breaking 100 cm of snow that fell in Blizzard of ’96. That’s when Victoria earned the dubious honour of receiving the third largest snowfall among Canada’s major cities.
If you want to relive it, here’s CBC’s archive on the Blizzard of ’96. http://goo.gl/wJagdA
Personally, I couldn’t stomach watching the whole thing through. I’ll see you in the sun!
Mathieu Powell is Vancouver Island Now’s representative for marketing and advertising for the Great Victoria area. For more about advertising opportunities with Vancouver Island Now, click here.