St. Albert has been blanketed with an icy blast of arctic air causing dead batteries and broken furnaces across the city.
All of Alberta, including St. Albert, is under an extreme cold warning after an arctic air mass descended on the province and temperatures drop into the -40 C range with the wind chill.
Steve Potvin, owner of SP Mechanical, said he has received a ton of calls from residents across the city complaining of no heat coming from their furnaces.
Typically Potvin gets six calls on an average winter day to go out and deal with furnaces, but with the cold snap he is getting 12 per day.
“It's just [with the cold weather] furnaces are running much more,” Potvin said, adding it's important to keep up with furnace maintenance to help prevent breakdown during the cold snaps.
“Cold elements do play a huge factor ... Everything's working hard,” Potvin said.
If vents outside frost up, like they do in St. Albert with the hoar frost in the morning, it will freeze up and stop the furnace from running, Potvin said.
It's important to keep the furnace filter clean and to prevent a breakdown Potvin said it's better to not drop the temperature in the house temporarily, like many residents do overnight, because when you want to turn the heat back up, the furnace has to work much harder.
Many car batteries across St. Albert are also shutting down.
Alberta Motor Association (AMA) vice-president of advocacy and operations, Jeff Kasbrick, said AMA has seen a 700-per-cent increase in call volumes since the cold snap first hit the province on Sunday.
“The province right now is blanketed in an absolute deep freeze and beyond that, it's also been a sustained deep freeze, and as a result of that we have seen enormous call volumes for roadside assistance,” Kasbrick said.
Typically AMA gets around 1,500 to 2,000 calls per day across the province, but on Monday calls jumped to 7,500. On Dec. 25, 26, and 27, AMA received 12,000 calls for services in the province.
In St. Albert, 85 per cent of the calls received by AMA are for dead batteries, Kasbrick said, so residents should expect a bit of a longer wait time for services, although the vice-president said he can’t quote exact wait times right now, because it all depends on the circumstances the driver is in.
Kasbrick said residents should stay home if they can so they can stay warm, but for those who are out travelling on the roads, they should make sure to leave enough time to get to their destination, be patient, have a plan, and keep an emergency bag in the vehicle.
Packing things such as warm clothes, a first aid kid, reflective cones, a mask, and hand sanitizer will help if a breakdown happens and Kasbrick said to always keep the gas tank full in case there is an emergency.
Cold to last the week
On Sunday, much of the province was issued an extreme cold weather warning and the icy blast is expected to last the rest of the week, said Justin Patten, meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.
“A big, cold arctic air mass has come down over the province and with that we also have clear skies and very, very cold conditions,” Patten said.
“A lot of our temperatures over the last couple days were going into the -30s C and with some light winds bringing to the wind chills down below -40 C and some areas to -50 C overnight."
In St. Albert on Monday temperatures hit an icy -37 C with the wind chill dropping temperatures further to -46 C.
“You get these air masses that sit over the Arctic for a long period of time [that] get very cold and then they will eventually move off and this one has come down over us,” Patten said.
On Saturday temperatures are expected to rise to a high of -9 C and a low of -14 C, but then temperatures will cool down again for the first week of January.
But the second wave of chilly temperatures will be less settled, causing temperatures to fluctuate a little more, according to Patten.
“There might be some more clouds and snow systems and things like that moving through the province, then it is just clear and cold like we're seeing this weekend.”
On Wednesday temperatures in St. Albert will hit a high of -25 C with a low of -30 C. Thursday will bring in temperatures with a high of -26 C and a low of -32 C, and on Friday the high will be -26 C with a low of -32 C.
