'Bomb' blizzard buries cars and homes with 3.5m of snow

A half buried car is parked in St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Photo / AP

The historic blizzard that slammed Canada's easternmost province is headed for Greenland - but it left snow-buried neighbourhoods, a slew of power outages and shattered records in its wake.

St John's superseded its record for the most snow in 24 hours, recording 76.2cm, as the storm hit Newfoundland and Labrador at the weekend. A state of emergency continued in the provincial capital and elsewhere through today as most businesses were ordered closed and few beyond emergency vehicles were allowed on the roads.

Snow drifts rose 3.5 to 4.5m high on some highways, officials said. The Canadian armed forces were called in to help clear the deluge.

"Newfoundlanders are going to be talking about this for a very, very long time," said Ashley Brauweiler, a meteorologist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in the province. Her station lost power during the storm and had to stop broadcasting. At one point, people there couldn't even open the door because of the snow that had piled up on the other side.

St John's International Airport measured 76.2cm of snowfall, its snowiest single day in records dating to 1942. The previous record of 68.3cm was set in April 1999. Totals in other areas were higher, and wind speeds of 160 km/h or greater made it difficult to measure the snow amid blowing and drifting.

A friend of mine in Newfoundland has just posted this picture. Unbelievable show storm and now the power’s out. pic.twitter.com/4st5kCoukR

— Rebecca Caine (@RebeccaCaine) January 17, 2020

Hurricane-force winds piled snow against homes, and residents woke yesterday to drifts that completely covered their cars and blocked first floors.

As one person put it on Twitter atop a picture of icy white pushing all the way up their windows: "All we can do now is hibernate!"

"Somewhere under all this is a row of cars and front doors," another person remarked, sharing a photo of one utterly blanketed road. "This is going to take a while."

The storm was a meteorological "bomb," having undergone a process of rapid intensification known as bombogenesis. With its central air pressure dropping quickly, the storm drew surrounding air into its centrer. The winds combined with the heavy snowfall to create whiteout conditions.

NOAA's Ocean Prediction Centre determined the central air pressure of the storm bottomed out at 954 millibars, more than a 54-millibar drop in less than 48 hours.

This week a big snow storm hit Newfoundland, Canada, and rather than dig themselves out, some decided to get creative and turn their front door entrances into beer fridges pic.twitter.com/SOyOgsuEAI

— Ian P. McCarthy (@Toffeemen68) January 19, 2020

While the storm was relatively short in duration, it was unusually ferocious even for an area used to powerful ocean storms during the winter - "as severe a blizzard as St John's metro has ever seen," tweeted one meteorologist, the Weather Network's Chris Scott, who placed the tempest "in an elite class with some of the most infamous nor'easter/Atlantic seaboard storms ever."

Snow cleanup efforts in the province had to be suspended at times amid deteriorating weather.

Brauweiler said she came home to no snow in her front yard, thanks to the wind. But the back door was a different story - there, it had piled as high as her head. Houses across the street had snow up to their second level.

She can't shovel, she said: Her neighbourhood has no footpaths, so "there's physically no place to put the snow."

"It is certainly something that I'll be talking about for the rest of my career," she said. "I've never seen anything like it."