As world weather patterns change and we find ourselves watching and enduring storms like the one last week, past weather has become a popular topic of conversation.
Locally, many people refer to Typhoon Freda in the early 1960s and the damage and deaths it caused. Others refer to snowfalls in the 1990s, the 1980s, and for a lot of folks, the early 1950s had some winters with extreme snow levels. Rain, wind, fog, snow, frosty and icy conditions, and recent extremely dry summers all seem to inspire memories of weather.
Looking back locally to the early decades of the 1900s, there are examples of snowfalls that led to the collapse of sizable structures, the curtailing of transit systems and many other hardships. Today we can “see” weather events online or on television in broad patches of bright colours, sometimes swirling, sometimes static, always intriguing.
In 1899, New Westminster and other spots in the Lower Mainland were completely taken off guard by what was referred to in the press as “The Cloud Burst.” The subheading summarized what took place here on Monday, Nov. 27, 1899: “Phenomenal rainfall accompanied by wind and hail yesterday, surprisingly little damage done.”
Apparently everything was quite all right in the city until mid-afternoon when “shortly after 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon without very much warning, the town was treated to a veritable cloud burst. For a time it was scarcely possible to see across the streets for the blinding sheets of rain.”
The inability of eavestroughs to cope, particularly on some flat-roofed new business blocks, set up a situation where “perfect waterfalls descended from all” such buildings. The major culvert that ran under Columbia Street, draining the deep gully, Wintemute’s ravine, between Fourth Street and Church Street, was the scene of a potentially dangerous situation.
Other damage in town from this cloudburst was to the fire hall roof and windows, terraced ground at Dr. Drew’s house on Sixth Street, the city’s arc street lights, flooded buildings, and so on. All of this from a cloudburst of a matter of minutes. A short time later, there was a “bright sunset.”
