Some areas of town reported only a murmur of rain while other sectors of Prince George were using words like "apocalyptic" to describe the weather violence of Wednesday night.
The rain came in sustained torrents, the wind whipped, and the lightning hardly allowed the thunder to take a break from about 8:30 p.m. until close to midnight.
The water rushed into flood pools all over the low-lying areas of the city. The most notable insta-lake sprang up at Fifth Avenue and Tabor Boulevard where adult evergreens were snapped off by the force of the wind and the water swamped cars and climbed up to the doors of nearby homes and businesses.
The Bob Harkins Branch of the Prince George Public Library had a murky pool in their recessed car-park.
The winds gusted up to 50 km/h and the rain that fell between 9-10 p.m. Wednesday was more than 15 mm, according to Environment Canada's measurements at the Prince George Airport.
"We are fully aware that other areas of the city got a worse dose of the overnight storm than what happened at the airport, but it still gives you an indication that it was quite a weather event you had last night," said Alyssa Charbonneau, a meteorologist with Environment Canada. "There can be a lot of variability from one side of a city to another."
Prince George was hardly alone in its experiences. Charbonneau said the storm that felled trees, flooded streets, knocked out electricity and did various other forms of damage was essentially confined to Prince George and did not move off to hit other communities, but "there were a number of storms that happened across the north due to the same overall weather pattern."
That was, specifically, record-high temperatures across the north (Wednesday's 30.9 surpassed the 30.6 mark set that day for P.G. in 1927) that mingled with a humidity ridge. The collision was electrifying.
"That pent up energy was released from the northeast right down into the southern interior," said Charbonneau, and it triggered not one but an archipelago of storms from the Yukon border down into the Okanagan and Kootenay regions.
The worst fears were not of flood, they were of fire. But the worst fears were not of flood, they were of fire.
"The BC Wildfire Service is currently responding to 72 new wildfires in the Prince George and Northwest fire centres," said Prince George's Fire Information Officer Amanda Reynolds. "The new fires were sparked by lightning and are burning in the Prince George, Vanderhoof/Fort St. James, Mackenzie, Nadina, Bulkley and Skeena fire zones."
These fires are not threatening homes or communities, yet. Many are located in terrain difficult to access by ground routes.
"Firefighting crews, helicopters and airtankers responded to multiple fires yesterday, and are continuing their fire suppression activities today," said Reynolds on Thursday morning. "With so many lightning-caused fires occurring in such a short period of time, it's important to keep in mind that any additional human-caused fires can divert critical resources away from naturally occurring fires. Forests and grasslands in much of northern B.C. are very dry, so wildfires may start easily, burn vigorously and challenge fire suppression efforts. The BC Wildfire Service is urging members of the public to use extreme caution when they are out in the backcountry."
While the forests were burning on one hand, they were also falling in some spots. City of Prince George crews had to clear a number of trees off of streets, roads and sidewalks while BC Hydro crews were responding over a wide area of the city to get the power back on.
"We had circuits from three substations go out - more than 7,000 customers affected in the Prince George area," said BC Hydro spokesperson Bob Gammer who added that trees were the main culprits for these outages. However, two lightning strikes in the Peace area caused more than 30,000 customers to lose power as the storm travelled northeast.
The Peace blackouts were restored in less than an hour, but the Prince George area's problems were not so simple.
"The crews had to wait for the storm to pass," said Gammer. "The outages happened between about 9-9:45 p.m. and once the extreme weather subsided, the crews could get to work. We had some customers back on as early as midnight and other than some individual locations, the last area to get service restored was Beaverly by about 3:30 a.m. It was a very fast-moving, severe storm but our crews were ready for it and acted quickly."
It isn't as easy to quickly dry the ground. In addition to the private homes and businesses that experienced flooding and other damage, the City of Prince George is now dealing with a sinkhole that opened up due to stormwater at the intersection of Winnipeg and Carney Streets, and issued a statement closing all municipal fields to baseball, soccer and other user groups.
"All city sport fields are closed due to over-saturation following last night's storm," said city hall spokesperson Michael Kellett. "The closures are necessary in order to protect the turf from root damage and to prevent player injury."
The advisory estimated the fields would be closed until at least today, but with more overnight storming in the forecast, there could be more consequences to come from wild weather.
