The North Shore was bracing for a storm of grand proportions over the weekend but it turned out to be more of a tempest in a teacup.
The remnants of Typhoon Songda, a Category 4 typhoon that traversed the Pacific, landed Saturday but managed to miss most highly populated areas.
“The storm ended up tracking about 30 kilometres west of the forecasted trajectory and so the impacts were shifted,” said Matt MacDonald, Environment Canada meteorologist. “I think the Lower Mainland and Victoria dodged a bullet, or at least the bull’s eye, in most regards.”
The highest wind speed recorded locally was 97 kilometres per hour at Point Atkinson on Saturday evening. A weather station on Pam Rocks farther out on Howe Sound hit 111 kilometers per hour.
The West Vancouver weather station picked up 97 millimeters of rain from Wednesday to Sunday. Mount Strachan’s station recorded more than double that, MacDonald said.
“If nothing else, this is a good indication of the beginning of the storm season, the most active months for storms being November and December,” he said.
Most of the damage done by high winds and rain happened in the first of a series of storms that blew in earlier in the week.
Those led to some temporary school and trail closures, plugged catch basins, downed trees and branches blocking streets, power outages and at least one vehicle was crushed by a falling tree. Saturday’s storm was anticipated to be the worst of the three.
The three local municipalities marshalled extra resources expecting a bigger wallop but found themselves largely overprepared Saturday, although that itself was something of a silver lining.
“We responded to a variety (of incidents) but we didn’t have a large number of wind-related damage, or trees down, wires down, that type of event,” said Brian Hutchinson, assistant chief with District of North Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services.
Several days prior to the storm, all three North Shore fire department’s chiefs and assistant chiefs met to lay out plans on “how we were going to support each other regardless of where it landed,” Hutchinson said.
“As much as the storm didn’t come to fruition, it was a really positive step forward in that we came together and put a plan in place that would have allowed us to have a really rapid and robust response if anything had occurred,” he said.
“I bet there’s very few areas in the Lower Mainland that took that type of unified approach to the coming storm.”
