Timmins area receives heavy snowfall on first day of spring

The calendar may say it’s the first day of spring, but Mother Nature had other plans for the Timmins area. Here’s how they are managing the snowfall.

The first day of spring in Timmins brought mounds of snow to the area.

“With this storm, we’ve had, again, high winds and (a) large volume of snow accumulation on the roadways, just like a couple weeks ago,” said Const. Kyler Brouwer, of the Ontario Provincial Police James Bay detachment.

And that’s why provincial police closed highways in the region Thursday.

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While Brouwer said Ontario 511 is the website to check up on highway conditions, the site experienced some technical difficulties and some closures were not showing on the map.

Brouwer encourages people who do have to drive, to proceed with caution.

“You can’t just drive the speed you would in the summer. You have to adjust your driving to fit the habits,” he said.

“Give yourself that increased safety distance between cars, because (in) at least two of the ones, the collisions that got reported on the fifth and sixth, had to do with rear-end collisions.”

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The City of Timmins public works department said it thinks Thursday’s accumulation is the most amount of snow it has had to deal with all winter.

“We had a pretty good one earlier in March, but the amount of snow that’s coming in this one and how wet and heavy it is, is going to be probably one of the most challenging, snowstorms of the year,” said Ken Krcel, the city’s public works director.

“So, I would agree that this is probably the heaviest one that I’ve seen this winter.”

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The city cancelled snow removal operations to focus on cleaning priority areas and delayed garbage collection.

Krcel said people need to plan for Timmins Transit delays during weather events like this one.

“I know people are going to ask about snow removal after this storm, and I think it’s important that people realize that we will be reprioritizing after the snow is over as to what areas need to be done first,” he said.

“It’s highly unlikely that we’re going to get every street redone this spring before Mother Nature starts melting all the snow. We run three crews a week. So that’s, you know, 120 hours of snow removal every week and it takes approximately six weeks to complete the city once.”

Krcel added the public works department is also experiencing a shortage of skilled workers who have their DZ licence.

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He said since COVID, about 30 to 40 per cent of the employees have been replaced due to retirements and resignations.