The snowstorm that took 2 weeks to clean up in P.E.I.
First the snow piled up, then it drifted all over the road in February and March of 1982
It must have been a long wait for Lloyd Murray as snowplows slowly dealt with the huge amounts of snow that had piled up in western Prince Edward Island.
His farmhouse was among the last to be dug out after a snowstorm slammed the region in 1982 and which took two weeks for the snowplows to fully clear.
In the interim, Murray had been forced to haul feed to his livestock on his snowmobile, one bag at a time, while the road to his farm in Prince County remained covered in snow.
Still, Murray told The National that things hadn't been so bad.
"Glad to get out," he said. "It could have been worse, though — if the power had been off or something, it would have been a lot worse than just the snow."
The National had been reporting on the snowstorm since it hit the Island the previous month — such as the report shown below from Feb. 26, 1982, when it was estimated it could take four days to get everyone dug out. (It actually would end up taking nine days from that point.)
No record, but no end to snowdrifts
"You couldn't convince many snowplow operators of this, but in P.E.I., February's snowfall was actually a little less than normal," the CBC's Michael Vaughan told viewers on March 7, 1982, the day that the roads had finally been cleared.
"The problem though is that never before has it drifted like this," he added, as viewers were shown visuals of snow sitting nearly as high on a road as the snowplow driver riding in a machine.
"It took 14 days to clear the last of the blocked roads."
As Vaughan told viewers, the roads had been cleared, but the snow had simply been banked alongside them.
In some cases, that left snow piles so high that they blocked out entire houses from view that were sitting behind them.
Still, Vaughan noted that "two weeks to the day after the storm first hit, Prince Edward Island is open again."
