A nasty storm that paralyzed the city of Saskatoon last week had a similar effect on Crop Production Week, an annual gathering of Saskatchewan commodity groups at the Saskatoon Inn.
Environment Canada meteorologist Bob Cormier said the Jan. 10 storm was the worst blizzard to hit the city since 1955.
It dumped 26 centimetres of snow over a 23 hour stretch, with winds gusting up to 90 km-h per hour, whipping the snow into a dense fog that restricted visibility to an arm’s length.
“I’ve been here for 13 years and it was by far the most significant winter event that I’ve seen,” said Cormier.
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Stalled vehicles shut down many of the city’s main arteries, leading to bumper-to-bumper traffic that turned a 20 minute trip home from work into a two hour, white knuckle adventure for many drivers.
Highway travel leading into the city was almost non-existent, taking a heavy toll on participation levels at the largest crop show held on the Prairies.
“There was a lot of people that wanted to come in Wednesday and it wasn’t feasible. In fact, in some cases people who just wanted to come across the city said, ‘the hell with it,’ and abandoned ship,” said Kevin Hursh, communications manager for the week-long event showcasing 10 different crops.
Attendance at the Jan. 11 event was limited to those who were already safely booked into the Saskatoon Inn. Hursh said about 200 people showed up to that evening’s special session on biofuel, compared to the 500 who took in last year’s panel discussion on the future of the prairie grain industry.
“I had a lot of people say they were coming. I would have thought we would have been close to last year’s numbers without the weather factor,” he said.
Some of the smaller associations that held meetings on Wednesday had a tough time rounding up enough delegates to form a sufficient quorum for voting on important issues at their annual general meetings.
The Saskatchewan Herb & Spice Association cancelled its Jan. 12 meeting altogether due to lingering travel concerns.
“They looked at it and said it just wasn’t feasible, so they’ve postponed to another date yet to be determined,” said Hursh.
Other groups escaped relatively unscathed because their meetings were scheduled on the days preceding or following the mid-week blizzard.
“We were really happy our conference was the first couple of days,” said Erin Athmer, communications manager for Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
Pulse Days attracted 950 people, the fourth highest attendance for the two-day event.
But organizers of that event had their share of grief as well. Athmer had to convince staff at the Saskatoon Inn to free up five extra rooms on Wednesday night to accommodate seven storm-stayed directors, two staff members and four Pulse Days speakers.
“We didn’t want them to head out onto the roads,” she said.
One speaker from Vancouver was stranded at the airport when it shut down its shuttle services after one of its vehicles hit the ditch. He arrived back at the hotel at 5 a.m. and didn’t get a flight out of the city until later that evening.
Athmer spent a sleepless night at the Saskatoon Inn, sharing a room with two other women.
The following morning she discovered her car wouldn’t start because she was unable to reach the hotel’s bank of plug-ins due to the huge snowdrifts that had formed in the parking lot. It was an eight-hour wait for a tow truck.
“It has been a long couple of days,” said an exhausted Athmer.
