Extreme Canadian Weather: Freakish Storms and Unexpected Disasters

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

As the author suggests, challenging weather conditions are a common
feature of our national life and a key contributor to our national
character. When things go wrong in Canada, the weather is often the
culprit: “the fact is that half of all Canadian disasters have been
caused by extreme weather.” This book examines the characteristics and
impact of a number of our nation’s infamous meteorological events.
Concise chapters cover the ice storm of 1998, tornadoes from various
years, the prairie dustbowl, the great blizzard of 1977, Maritime
hurricanes, Red River floods, hailstones, and forest fires. The book
includes a number of black-and-white photos, as well as a map of Canada
marked with the locations of various extreme weather events.

Unfortunately, most of the book is rather dull. Dixon’s descriptions
of the devastation caused by natural cataclysms, and of the sublimity of
enormous natural forces, rarely escape the quotidian. On occasion, the
author’s figurative language can be strikingly inapt, as in this
description of an icestorm apparently forged by fire: “More than a
month later, ice remained on the sidewalks of Montreal, in spite of the
work of jackhammers and ice picks. The cold weather had welded the ice,
and later snow, to the ground.” Despite its dullness, however, the
book does furnish a sense of the variety and significance of Canada’s
extreme weather, while occasionally providing notable nuggets of trivia,
such as “Canada’s largest hailstone on record—290 grams and the
size of a grapefruit—landed in Cedoux, Saskatchewan, in 1973.”