Winter slams into Montreal

On Friday we got hit with 40cm of snow.... it was a living hell driving to and from work LOL... It turns out it was a record snowfall for December. Right now looking out my window it looks like late February, early March there's so much snow on the ground. The city is trying to deal with it but it's a slow process.

Going to work was the worse. It was coming down in massive amounts... so much so the drive along the Met was almost at a standstill. My back window was continually covered up by the snow, the de-icers and my heater had no effect... I had to get out 2 or 3 times on the elevated portion of the highway to clear it because I couldn't see out the back window or my right side window.. in short it was dangerous.

The worse came whem my wipers stopped working as I was approaching the interchange at l'Acadie with the 15... I literally had my arm outside wiping my windsheild with my snow brush as I manoeuvered around the worse part of the entire trip. I eventually stopped about a kilometer up the 15 and discovered to my enthusiastic delight there was ice that had built up around the base of the wipers and once removed they worked again... Phew... Laval city crews though pushed meter high piles of snow into intersections causing many cars to get stuck as they tried to cross the road... it was a disaster. Many cars were off on the side of the road, peolpe had trouble seeing ahead of them. There were several cars that hit snowbanks and got stuck as well as stalled vehicules. Two hours it took to get to work..

Coming home in was no better although the snow had let up. An 18 WHeeler had jacknifed on the 15 south leaving me stuck there for about an hour. The roads had deep snow and ice ruts with half meter high snowbanks between each lane at some points. I've never seen that my entire life. Then the entrance to the 40 was closed for snowclearing. I was forced onto the 40 West with no signage to indicate where to go to get East.. God forbid I was a tourist or business traveller. I knew to take Chemin Rockland even though I ended up on the service road of the 40 East and basically drove into what was effectively a 10 km parking lot... eventually we crawled past the l'Acadie Interchange only to see it wasn't being snowplowed.. they had all day to fix that but decided for whatever reason to just close it down. What idiots... really, like that helped the situation. They are paid to clear the roads not ignore them. Sigh... That whole multi million dollar Interchange revamp is a total mess. It floods in summer and now it is too dangerous in winter. I actually wrote my city counceller over that when I got home... it needs to be fixed big time; it was infuriating to have been forced away from it when we needed it the most. It took me 2.1/2 hours to get home and then I had 90 minutes of shovelling.

Anyways... such is life. The drivers were actually quite skillful throughout it all. People kept their distance and the speed down and seemed to respect one another. I guess we all knew what a mess it was and just accepted it for being exactly that. THe snowblowers are slowly clearing it all out. I heard them all last night and into the morning whirring away in distant streets around my house. The did the other side of my street this morning..