As Yogi Berra once said, it ain’t over til it’s over.
And while the quotable catcher was talking about the great summer game of baseball, it seems fitting to describe a battle with winter that’s taken Thunder Bay well into extra innings. On Monday the city was hit with its third snowstorm since Major League Baseball’s Opening Day at the start of April.
In the latest tilt Jack Frost tossed up to 17 centimetres at the Thunder Bay area causing more than eight collisions as of 11 a.m., a number police expect will double by the day’s end.
And the hits keep coming, said Environment Canada’s Geoff Coulson.
The city will struggle with some rain and single digit temperatures, the seasonal normal is around 10C, and a system from the U.S. is expected to bring even more snow Thursday and Friday.
So much snow that Environment Canada may have to issue weather warnings, especially for areas east of the city.
With the exception of one or two warm days, advanced forecasts show that winter-like conditions might stick around until May.
“I wish I had better news for the folks in Thunder Bay,” Coulson said from his Toronto office. “Spring won’t arrive anytime in the foreseeable future.”
There is no weather phenomenon to explain the spring slump. It is just a battle between warm and cold air masses that have been as one-sided as a Detroit Tigers’ visit to Minute Maid Park.
“These cold air masses have definitely been winning out,” Coulson said.
And lest summer fans think miserable spring numbers might put their favourite season on a hot-streak into October, Coulson said there’s no way to tell what the cold-snap means into the future.
“I wish there was that correlation between what the spring does and what the summer may do and what the fall may do after that,” he said.
“The way things are shaping up it just looks like a continued slow transition into seasonal temperatures.”
Still the weather can’t keep a good gardener down. Vanderwees Greenhouses and Nursery’s Louise Kondakow said greenthumbs in Northwestern Ontario expect the snow until the May Long weekend.
“It’s business as usual here. We’re planting and fully expecting the weather to turn and start getting outside to our gardens fairly soon,” she said.
People can start cleaning up their gardens as soon as they can see them.
Freezing temperatures, which aren’t in the forecast as much, worry gardeners more than snow Kondakow said.
