Already 19 days overdue, Joy Egilson woke up just knowing she would finally give birth that day.
Then she peered out the window of her Cordova Bay home. Four feet of snow peered back. It was Dec. 29, 1996.
“When I looked out, I realized we weren’t going to go to the hospital,” she recalls. That was unnerving. She hadn’t planned on having her baby at home, with no doctor in sight.
So Joy gave herself a pep talk: “Women have been doing this for millennia.”
As it turned out, her doctor was able to round up a labour and delivery nurse who lived less than half a kilometre away — though it still took that woman 45 minutes to wade through the never-ending snow. A friend recruited a midwife, too, which made for quite a full house, considering all the Egilson relatives who had come for Christmas and were now trapped inside.
Husband Michael’s contribution that day was to A) shovel off the roof to stop it from collapsing, and B) tie off the umbilical cord with some sterilized-but-slippery, hard-to-knot kite string. “It was the only thing I could find,” he says.
And that’s how Megan Egilson, the Blizzard Baby, arrived in the world.
“I was really trying to make an entrance,” the 25-year-old says. She’s a massage-therapy student at Camosun College now.
It’s hard to believe the Blizzard of ’96 was a quarter century ago. Were you here then? If not, read on and learn. If you were there, you might want to lie down first and have someone stroke your forehead and sing Soft Kitty in a soothing voice until the screaming stops.
The Blizzard is one of those benchmark catastrophes that Victorians rate alongside such disasters as the 1917 Halifax Explosion or the 2021 Vancouver Canucks. It happened when 124 centimetres of snow — more than Winnipeg gets in an average winter — fell at the airport between Dec. 21 and 30. Most of it piled up over three days after Christmas.
That would be a shock for any community, let alone one as unprepared as ours was. To Victorians, snow is something that happens somewhere else, just like tornadoes, hockey riots or late-night dining.
When it does show up, most people deal with it in the same way they would a bill collector on the doorstep: Close the drapes and wait for it to go away. This usually works. If you build a snowman in Prince George in November, he’ll still be there come March. Build a snowman in Victoria, and the carrot will be on the bare lawn by lunch.
Not always, though, as we found out this week. And certainly not in 1996. The flakes that began drifting down on that Boxing Day grew thicker and thicker — 18 cm on Dec. 27, another 13 on the 28th and then a mindboggling 65 on Dec. 29. That last number easily dwarfed the heaviest one-day snowfall ever recorded in Toronto or Montreal.
For a few days, the region was overwhelmed. There was no way what little snowplowing equipment we had could keep up. The streets were impassable. B.C. Ferries cancelled sailings Dec. 29; neither crews nor passengers could get to Swartz Bay.
Buildings couldn’t handle the weight of the wet, heavy accumulation. Saanich Peninsula greenhouses collapsed. Vantreights lost 60,000-square-feet worth — that’s a lot of glass. Eurosa Gardens, which lost 80,000 rose plants, and Marigold Nurseries were also hard-hit.
Four airplanes — two Otters, two Beavers — were crushed when a pair of Viking Air hangars caved in at Victoria airport, though workers dragged 15 other aircraft to safety before the groaning structures gave out.
At Sidney’s Capital City Yacht Club, docks were submerged by the wintry buildup, meaning no one could get to the boathouses to prevent them from crumpling under the weight of the snow; more than 30 boats sank.
Durrance Road Elementary ended up needing a new gym. The Oak Bay tennis bubble deflated. Other damaged buildings included the Esquimalt Legion, Slegg Lumber in Esquimalt, the Royal Bank on Oak Bay Avenue, the James Bay Thrifty Foods, the Panorama Leisure Centre and the Glen Meadows curling club. A couple with a five-month-old son got out of a floathome before it sank at West Bay marina.
Yet even as things fell apart, individuals stepped up. Staff couldn’t get to and from hospitals and care homes, so the people who were already there kept working.
CFAX radio, with broadcasters Mike King and Greg Morin jumping in early, was the region’s de facto communication centre. “The station became a clearing house of information for a storm-bound populace,” a TC editorial declared, “and its role in matching services to people desperately in need of help has earned it the community’s gratitude.”
Remember, the Internet was in its infancy then. Few people had cellphones, let alone smart phones. Social media was a distant dream (or nightmare).
TC stories would later tell of how Environment Canada forecaster Darlene Taylor arrived for work at her office at the airport, then ended up stuck on her own for 11 hours because her relief couldn’t get through. She only had a few crackers and cheese to eat. When another forecaster arrived, having hitched a ride on a snowplow, he brought her soup.
Airport manager Terry Stewart and others dug out runway lights by hand and kept the snowplows running; they managed to keep the airport open for all but one day.
There were casualties. One man succumbed to carbon-monoxide poisoning in his car in Sidney. In downtown Victoria, a man clearing snow from a Dominion Hotel skylight was hurt when the glass gave way, sending him plummeting to the lobby floor.
Area morgues were full because funeral homes couldn’t get to them to remove bodies. Likewise, the coroner needed the winter-worthy trucks of the Canadian Scottish Regiment to retrieve the dead from homes. One corpse had to be taken down a street by sled, to the neighbours’ dismay.
Also transported that way was a woman who, unlike Joy Egilson, was able to give birth at Victoria General Hospital after two of the 143 army reservists who jumped into blizzard duty pulled her down the street in a sled, then loaded her into a 4X4, which ferried her to an ambulance.
Before they could rescue others, though, some reservists had to rescue themselves. Thirty Canadian Scottish soldiers who had been training at Albert Head had to use snowshoes to shovel their way two or three kilometres to the main road. They then made their way to the Bay Street armoury.
The blizzard cemented Greater Victoria’s reputation as Dysfunction-By-The-Sea. The fragmented nature of the region’s governance led to stories of breakdowns in communication, squandered resources and uncertainty over authority.
Snow-clearing came to symbolize the mess: the lack of co-ordination between a dozen municipalities meant motorists — including ambulances — frequently found themselves blocked by snowbanks at civic borders. The CRD would later respond by forming a regional emergency co-ordinators commission.
Still, the truth is that as much as we love to blame government, some crises are simply overwhelming. Coquihalla bridges get wiped out, the Malahat gives way, the power goes off, stores run out of food and there’s nothing anyone can do, at least not right away. In that case, you had better be prepared to take care of yourself and your neighbours, because no one else can.
That’s what happened in 1996. As much as we flutter about what a terrible time it was, in truth there was a spirit of camaraderie, with neighbours helping — and often meeting for the first time — neighbours. Volunteers with four-wheel-drives shuttled strangers to hospital, or fetched medication. People shovelled each others’ walks.
In some ways, the blizzard couldn’t have hit at a better time: just after Christmas. Just like this week, many had a fridge full of turkey leftovers. Schools were closed for the holidays. Half the town was off work and didn’t really have to go anywhere, anyway. The lasting memory for many people was the quiet, the perfect stillness of a world muffled by snow. It was magic (though we were still happy when the magic melted).
Joy Egilson remembers happily resting in the comfort of her own bed in her own home, her new baby in her arms, listening to a CBC Radio show on which a succession of callers relayed their blizzard horror stories. So she phoned in and said: “Something wonderful happened to me … .”
