October storm: More than 3,000 Manitoba households still without power

Manitoba Hydro crews are working on Tuesday to restore power to the roughly 3,170 customers still without power in severe weather-related outages.

“We will continue to work through the day, restoring power as safely and quickly as possible. If you see downed lines, stay back 10m and call 911,” Manitoba Hydro wrote on X Tuesday morning.

High winds, rain, and heavy wet snow brought down trees and damaged power lines in many areas of northern, eastern, and western Manitoba on Monday.

At its peak, more than 12,000 households were affected. By Monday night, 4,500 customers were still in the dark.

“It was so beautiful. Like it looks like a winter wonderland,” said Jean Singque, a South Indian Lake Resident.

“We’re just using generators, and I’m not sure if there’s enough source of gas here in our community, so last night, we slept in very cold conditions in the house.”

She says the school’s maintenance refilled the gas in their generators this morning, and the chief and council did their best to help everyone in need.

Snow Lake, true to its name, took the bulk of the storm, with 35 centimetres of snowfall. The surrounding areas of Thompson, the Pas and other communities saw up to 20 centimetres.

“Keep in mind that some of that precipitation did fall as rain as well. So we did see a total of 67 millimetres of water equivalent in the Pas,” said Danielle Desjardins, warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

This, after a drought and one of the worst wildfire seasons on record.

“Any moisture does help; however, when you receive this amount of precipitation in a short period of time, especially given that it was wet snow and it accumulated quite quickly, there were power outages, so there are impacts to having such a large amount of precipitation in a short period of time,” said Desjardins.

Desjardins says they’re tracking another system that’s expected to hit some of the same communities this weekend.

“We’re expecting it to be a little bit weaker and mostly fall as rain,” said Desjardins.

She says, looking broadly past that, Manitobans can expect what’s called a weak La Niña winter.

“Typically, for Manitoba, that means that it’s going to be colder and snowier,” Desjardins explained.

But she says that because it’s weak, it’s less predictable.

-With files from Stef Lasuik