An RCMP officer stands on guard on Parliament Hill during a winter storm Tuesday. Darren Brown / Postmedia

Ottawa is well accustomed to winter storms, the municipality has equipment to meet the needs of a fairly large city where winter brings constant snowstorms and other kinds of inclement weather such as freezing rain. There was a winter storm warning in effect. The forecast was for between 20 to 30 centimetres of snow to fall throughout the night from Monday into Tuesday. Although some snow did fall on Monday night, Tuesday was without further snowfall into the early morning hours.

And then, around eight in the morning, thick curtains of snow began descending. And didn't stop until over twelve hours later. Schools in the area had declared a 'snow day' and school buses weren't running. Public transit was running as usual, but unusually, buses were up to 40 minutes late in arrival, and those that did carry passengers by mid-afternoon ran as late as four hours to their final destinations. Municipal plows were out but concentrating, of course, on major streets.

A cyclist and pedestrian cross Elgin Street. Errol McGihon / Postmedia

We were snowed in, literally. By the time half-past ten in the evening rolled around the skies had cleared, the snow stopped. That's when my husband went out with the snow-thrower and cleared the driveway for the second time that day, and shovelled all the walkways. On our street, there were cars left stranded on the road, and abandoned, their drivers having tried everything to move their snow-stalled vehicles on the unplowed street.

By the time we were preparing to turn off our bedside lamps we could hear a tractor with a plow, a private operator, out behind us on the crescent that runs into our street. Our little dogs, normally overjoyed to romp in the snow, got fed up with getting snow-covered and having to be wiped of the snow each time they returned to the house after being out in the backyard through the day. They likely missed that we hadn't gone out for our usual ravine ramble. But the snow was thigh-high.

This morning our street still hadn't been plowed. Our curbside kitchen waste and paper-recycling pick-up hadn't taken place. Cars were still moored in the thick snow that had stalled them the night before. When the plow did come by it swooped the snow off the street into driveways. And since our house is located on a curve of the street, our driveway gets the lion's share during street sweeps, of the cleared snow. By then it's become icy, lumpy, hard and difficult to shovel.

The snowfall wasn't quite the 30 centimetres predicated, but turned out after all, to be a record snowfall, at 50 centimetres of the fluffy white stuff. This winter has been a relatively snow-sparse one up to now. Yesterday's snowfall has gone some way to bringing us back to where our usual annual snowpack generally is by this time of year. But we have, in winters past, had far more of a snowpack; on the other hand, winter is nowhere near concluded for 2016.