Near-record levels of snow in Whitehorse kept emergency crews busy all morning Tuesday.
Fire Chief Kevin Lyslo said the first snowfall of the season had his crews responding to calls non-stop from 8 a.m. to noon.
Backup crews had to be brought in to man the stations because the crews on duty never made it back to the office.
“They would finish one call and go on to the next,” Lyslo said.
The calls were all for motor vehicle accidents or downed power lines. No one was seriously hurt.
Val Pike, spokesperson for Whitehorse General Hospital, said the emergency room saw four people Tuesday who came in with minor injuries after going off the road. They were all treated and released.
When asked which areas were the worst, Lyslo responded: “The highway. Along the highway was all bad.”
Whitehorse RCMP spokesperson Dean Hoogland said police responded to a crash on the Alaska Highway near the North Klondike Highway when a Chevy Trailblazer collided with a Yukon highways department dump truck.
The 28-year-old driver of the Chevy was taken to hospital by ambulance, treated and released. The driver of the dump truck was driven to hospital by a colleague to be checked out, Hoogland said.
A Ford Focus lost control on the Alaska Highway near Fish Lake Road and hit a light post, Hoogland said. No one was hurt.
Later that morning a rolled vehicle was spotted near Cowley Creek. When police investigated, no one was inside the car. Hoogland said the owner made arrangements to have it towed.
On Jarvis Street near Second Avenue, a tree fell on a parked car, but no one was inside at the time.
In all, RCMP, with the help of bylaw officers, responded to dozens of calls, “mostly in the hilly areas of town” like Mountain View Drive and Two Mile Hill, Hoogland said.
Traffic often moved at a crawl along both Two Mile Hill and Mountain View Drive in the morning, with some cars spinning out and others pulling over.
Yesterday’s snowfall was nearly a record for the day. We got a total of 9 cm of snow, said meteorologist Andre Besson with Environment Canada. The record for Sept. 30 is 11.7 cm, set in 1974.
At Kal Tire, by mid-afternoon yesterday staff had already put on 50 sets of winter tires. They had another 40 left to do that day.
ATCO Electric Yukon (formerly Yukon Electrical Company Limited) spokesperson Laura Carlson said crews were dealing with downed trees on power lines as fast as they could.
Sporadic outages were happening mostly in the area from the Carcross corner through to Teslin, Carlson said.
In Whitehorse, a fallen tree took down a line near the Whistle Bend subdivision. Power went out to the nearby golf course but not the homes, she said.
Contact Ashley Joannou at
ashleyj@yukon-news.com