The first full day of spring yesterday found Nick Laporte shovelling snow off the roof of a North Bay house.
It is one of about 30 or 40 such jobs he was hired to do this winter.
“I’m thinking this roof might be one of the last ones. It was a last minute call because of a leaking roof. The snow is super heavy now, but it is starting to diminish a little bit with the warm weather.”
The North Bay native and Olympic hopeful took on the work to raise money for his upcoming trip to Sweden on March 27 for a track and field training camp in preparation for his opening race on May 22.
“When I first put the ad up, I was just expecting a few calls, but it ended up getting shared quite a bit on Facebook. I’ve been super steady ever since, and I’m grateful to all the people who reached out to me,” said Laporte.
This winter has definitely been one for the books, with mammoth amounts of snowfall and long stretches of extremely cold temperatures.
It has been a good season for businesses which rely on the cold and snow, whether it is to sell items like winter apparel, tires, shovels or salt.
And of course, garages, towing companies, snow removal companies, and the taxi industry, to name a few, also reap the benefits of a harsh winter.
Larry Bartlett, CEO of Bartlett’s Towing in North Bay said on Wednesday of this week, he had to remove a vehicle that got stuck when the driver was attempting to get his ice hut off the lake.
“We’ve been awfully busy this winter. January was very exciting for us. We’ve done all kinds of things this season, and the cold weather has really pumped it up,” said Bartlett.
“We’ve been doing everything from the average boost, as you can imagine with the cold weather we had, and of course accidents, but we’ve also been out on the lake a fair bit too with people getting stuck out there. And we were working with a movie company that wanted to do some production on the ice, so we were working with Cardinal doing stuff out there as well early in the new year.”
In January, Bartlett received a call to pull a brand new, 2019 Subaru out of the lake after it went down in a swampy area near Nipissing Village.
Fortunately, no one was injured.
“He was driving along and staying on top of the swamp because it was semi-frozen but then he got to an area where there was a very small creek and it made a soft area and he just fell down into some soft, soft clay and it was all cattails and that kind of stuff. We were driving through duck blinds to get to it for about two miles.”
Barlett said the driver was following what he thought was a safe flag line.
“But unfortunately, flag lines aren’t always safe for vehicles. This one was marked for snowmobiles, and he just sank. By the time they called us, it was frozen solid through the whole bottom of the passenger side of the vehicle,” explained Bartlett.
“It was right through the bumpers and everything so we couldn’t just pull on it or we’d rip the lights off and the bumpers off and all the sensors for the airbag and all of that kind of stuff would be ripped off if we didn’t do it properly. We had to thaw it out, so we built a tent around it and put heaters and blowers around it and thawed out the ground around it and then pulled the vehicle out. It took six days.”
John Strang of You-Need-A-Cab experienced an increase in ridership at his cab company once the temperatures took a major dive.
“People who tend to wait for a city bus don’t want to do that when it is -30 out. People who might walk or even take a bicycle don’t do that when it is that cold or stormy out, so they call a taxi,” said Strang.
“And as the towing companies get involved with boosting and going out to pull cars out of ditches and everything else, people then turn to us to come and boost them. We do that, but again it is an increase in demand, so it takes longer to get to your regular customers and to all the customers in general.”
Based on a year to year comparison, this was a good winter for business.
“Our business in a sense is weather dependent. Any time we have inclement weather, whether it is extreme heat, rain, snow, cold, those are days in the industry that we look forward to because it means that the demand for our services is up.”
The snow banks are starting to melt, and there are glimpses of dry pavement, but northerners know just because the calendar says it is spring, doesn’t mean we’re done with winter-like conditions.
However, the milder temperatures do give cause to be cautiously optimistic that any signs of winter will soon be a thing of the past.
