It has been just over two years since a winter storm shut down the southeast.

In October 2019, Environment Canada was issuing warnings for southern Manitoba and schools divisions were cancelling classes due to strong winds and large amounts of snow.

Environment and Climate Canada Senior Climatologist David Phillips called it a "legend of the Prairies".

Phillips says the seeds of the storm were sowed back in September when it was one of the wettest Septembers on record. He says we saw three times the amount of rain we normally would. Farmers were stuck waiting for it to stop or get their combines stuck in the muck. The first week of October was dry, and farmers were able to start their harvest, but then the snow started falling on Thursday, October 11th.

 

"It was just an all-day kind of an event for some of those days. Visibility was down to less than a kilometre, winds were 57 kilometres per hour," says Phillips. "It was a wet, soppy snow, but you could still lift it. The winds could still lift it and blow it around and blizzards and white outs, and the impacts were most felt from power outages."

Phillips says the leaves hadn't fallen off of the trees yet. The leaves, along with the wet snow, weighed down branches that snapped and fell on top of power lines and transmission towers, knocking out power to more than 266,000 households and businesses. Manitoba Hydro reported more than 4,000 poles were replaced and over 950 kilometres of power lines were re-strung.