Snow Day....London, Ontario Canada. Do you have any "snow day" memories of your own?

It has been a long time since I can remember a snowfall as big as this one!

It began yesterday. Snowsqualls from lake effect winds from the East were supposed to give the London Ontario area some "snow flurries". Well, let me tell you that snow flurries was NOT what hit London Ontario Canada last night.

Arctic air masses passing over the relatively warm waters of Lake Huron dumped as much as 48 inches of snow on this SouthWestern Ontario city. We are talking FOUR FEET OF SNOW! Can you even imagine that much snow in one day?

Needless to say, the snowfall literally paralyzed this city of nearly 400,000 people. Yet, towns surrounding London didn't even get a trace of snow on the ground -- they got the "flurries".

Cars are buried and the side streets are impassable. I even saw two large city snow plows trying to extricate a third. The snow plow was stuck!

City schools, the University of Western Ontario and, well, just about everything else in London have been closed until Monday.

Do you have any memories of "snow days" in your past?

I remember one time when I was in jr. high, (that was a long time ago) and we had such a great snow fall that the snow drifts wents all the way up to the roof of the house. No school for days! We could actually climb up onto the roof, and slide down the drifts. That was pretty cool.

It's a good thing we had a large covered entry porch that probably went 10 feet back undercover to the front door...otherwise we would have been snowed in... and that would have been just horrible to have that much snow & not be able to play in it.

Edit** to add....I forgot to say that was in Oregon. My mother told me about a blizzard that happened in 1968 the year that I was born, where they were snowed in for over a week...completely snowed in. No power & no way to get firewood in the house. I was 6 months old, and my mom said that her and my dad zipped 2 sleeping bags together, put my sister and I inside and then my folks crawled in and that's how they kept us warm until the snow melted back.

[edit on 12/8/2006 by jensouth31]

The worst snow I've ever seen was a few years ago here in Colorado, days before I kept hearing something about El-Nino on the weather channel, was across the street at my friends house and had spent the night, it started snowing that night. When we woke up, there was 2 feet already. So I hung around for a bit and the snow kept comming. I think this happened in 2001 because my dog was still alive. After a while the snow was at about 3 feet so I sent out and started jumping off of high things which was fun. I managed to cross the street back to my house, which took me about 10 minutes. Had to let my poor 16 year old dog outside. He looked at the snow like, wtf? Then tried to jump into it and got stuck. So I helped the poor guy out. He wasn't very big as the picture shows.



Yeah that storm was bad, everyone came out of their houses and started digging each other out. Was an awesome community effort.