Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann facetiously wonders whether we’ve had enough snow this winter. For our local history feature this week, she researched some epic single snowfalls.
Possibly the largest ever for Timmins was on January 27th, 1938, when 72 centimetres fell. That’s 28 inches.
“The Hollinger Meteorological Office issued a statement saying that there was probably enough snow – or they were calculating the amount of snow that fell per hour at 6,500 tons,” Bachmann reports. “How they figured this out, I don’t know. They also had, they figured, about 1,000 tons fell on Third Ave. alone.”
The meteorologists also calculated that the entire event blanketed Timmins in 230-thousand tons of flakes.
Turning to digging out of that, Bachmann says Town Hall added 150 men to the crew and brought in 30 extra trucks to haul it away.
“It took the community ten days to dig out from this atrocious thing, and ‘dig out’ meaning that we could have at least one lane of traffic going through.”
Next week: A single snow storm that was probably worse, and definitely had some disturbing consequences