Wind, snow, poor visibility shut down Iqaluit

You can see across the street in Iqaluit’s Lower Base neighbourhood on April 5, but you can’t see far. Higher-lying areas of the city were also affected by snow drifting across roads during the afternoon of April 5, when a decision was made by city officials to stop municipal services, and effectively close the city down. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

(updated at 6 p.m.)

Most people in Iqaluit stayed at home during the afternoon of April 5 — although for some that meant first digging through high snow drifts so they could get to the front door.

As lunch hour ended on Thursday, the City of Iqaluit decided to shut down, pulling all its water, sewage and garbage trucks off the roads, hunkering down its snow plows, and sending all workers home. Shortly thereafter, other offices, businesses, stores, airlines and even gas stations closed.

The Government of Nunavut, the federal government, and other organizations shut down their offices. Taxi companies pulled their vehicles off the roads. Northmart decided to close its doors at 2 p.m. and the Qikiqtani General Hospital announced it would receive emergency cases only. Schools and day cares remained closed for the day.

Only Arctic Ventures store stayed open — although at 4 p.m. managers weren’t sure for how much longer they would have enough staff to keep going.

But many people in Iqaluit wondered why the city shut down when there was no weather warning in effect.

They questioned on Twitter and Facebook why an Environment Canada wind warning — put up during the night of April 4 — was taken down during the late morning of April 5, and why there was no blizzard or blowing snow warning put up in its place.

But that made sense to Yvonne Bilan-Wallace, a meteorologist with Environment Canada.

That’s because as bad as the weather conditions may have seemed, they didn’t meet Environment Canada’s criteria for severe weather warnings at that time.

“We forecast within certain boundaries,” she said, and Iqaluit’s weather during the early afternoon of April 5 didn’t meet the conditions for either a wind or blizzard warning.

Forecasters with Environment Canada didn’t see conditions meeting the criteria for a blizzard warning then, she said — that is, visibility of less than 400 metres lasting for more than six hours.

But at 3:30 p.m., they changed their mind and put up a blizzard warning (removed two hours later).

Environment Canada puts out weather warnings up in the North only when there’s truly hazardous conditions in store, Bilan-Wallace said.

Otherwise some communities could see daily warnings and start to ignore them: “people become immune to them,” she said.

For example, in the place of putting up daily blowing snow warnings in Nunavut, Environment Canada puts more information into its forecast about conditions, such as how much visibility there is. That’s something Environment Canada doesn’t do in the South, Billan-Wallace said.

“We’re giving people [in the North] the information they need,” she said.

But Bilan-Wallace advises reading the full text of the Environment Canada forecasts to learn about weather conditions.

Don’t rely on the weather icons for your information in any event, Bilan-Wallace said.

Supplement your information by looking outside and seeing how the conditions could affect your activities. This way you can make well-informed decisions, she said.

In the case of weather-watchers at the City of Iqaluit, that decision was to shut down the city about three hours before Environment Canada issued the blizzard warning, which lasted only another two hours.