Snowstorm troopers
Call the army to shovel snow? Not in this town.
It’s been 30 years since the “snowstorm of the century,” with traffic snarled, flights grounded, and the army called in to bail residents out.
By the end of 24 hours, some 35 centimetres of snow had accumulated, bringing the city to a standstill.
Wait, just 35 centimetres? That’s far short of the 46 centimetres that fell at Pearson Airport on Sunday, and the 60-odd centimetres dumped downtown – for which we did not call in the storm troopers.
That’s because this winter catastrophe occurred not in Toronto, but in Vancouver in 1996. The normally mild B.C. burg was truly unprepared for a storm of any significant magnitude, with only 16 snow removal trucks covering all of Vancouver and a typical annual accumulation of just seven centimetres.
The Toronto Star took particular glee in reporting on those west coast snowflakes, giving Vancouver the front page treatment on Dec. 30, 1996.
Check out the double headline – “British Columbia paralyzed by snow” and “Motorists stranded, army called in.”
That’s a lot of A1 real estate for a weather event so far from the city the Toronto Star serves. Could a local paper possibly be mocking another city in its time of need?
If Torontonians were snickering at the time over wimpy western Canadians blanching over a little snow, it would come back to bite them hard just three winters later.
That’s when Toronto mayor Mel Lastman infamously waved the white flag and called in the army to clean up our own snowstorm in 1999.
To this day, the rest of the country won’t let Toronto live that one down. The media has been all over the story – yet again – in light of Sunday’s massive snow dump.
So even though we just came through the biggest 24-hour accumulation of snow in Toronto history – bigger even than any official one-day record in Ottawa or Montreal – we wouldn’t dare call in the army this time.
But next time we are reminded of that dubious day when our military beat their swords into plowshares snowplows – and we will be, you can count on that – just remember to give those west coast trailblazers the credit they deserve.
Very funny