Sometime in the late 80s early 90s
People rarely believe this when I tell them, but there was a time when the climate was just right for excessive snowfall, upwards of several metres over the course of the winter, which created some less than pleasant moments for everyone. I was living in Goose Bay, Labrador on the military base in housing that was designed for Florida. (The base was originally American, it was a refuel point for fighters to get them between North America and Europe back when they needed to refuel.) They leaked during any snow/rainfall, then due to the fact that the heating was terrible, the parts that leaked would freeze in the night and you would wake up to indoor icicles. The snow of course would give some insulation from the wind but the moisture caused by the heat differences would create a host of other problems. In short, not pleasant.
The snow as mentioned above during the beginning and end of the winter season would be excessive, unless there was a cold snap that prohibited it. Minus forty five degrees Celsius without wind was not abnormal. School was cancelled only if they couldn't get the school warm enough to have classes. Out of the three years I was there, the first two had extreme snowfall, the last year was minus 65 degrees with windchill included, so it didn't snow much. The years with excessive snow were probably worse than the extreme cold because at least I didn't have to shovel the cold. We had shovels, but for the most part we used large two handed scoops to handle the snow. Half way through the season, the banks would be well above the first floor, and it would start to become difficult to find places to put loads. At first we would make ramps on top of the already 5m banks and if we got a running start we could get most of the snow in the scoop to stay on top. Anyone who didn't guard their driveway would find a little extra courtesy of their neighbours. Further on people would be wandering around parks looking for places to dump, later still people would be walking to the edge of town.
Any cars with their heater blocks not plugged in over night would basically be bricked for a day or so. You would usually have to start up the car, go inside for about 20 minutes, and then it would only be chilly for the first 20 minutes of the drive. Due to the fact that there was no road out of town though, you didn't spend too much time in the car anyway. Goose Bay only had a "road" out of town during the summer, which amounted to nor much more than a trail in the woods that may or may not have been washed out by the spring thaw. People were required to bring a few extra tanks of gas, topographical maps, a week's worth of food and basic first aid supplies, as the next town, basically a maintenance station for the large hydroelectric dam there, was 300 kilometres away. The next town after that was another 200, and then it was a 7 hour drive to Quebec City, the nearest city reachable by land. If something went wrong you either got picked up by another car or died. There were no cell phones or GPS then.
Very few cars made it over that road, and while I was there nothing was shipped on it. Everything came in on the boat that only ran three months of the year, or via military airplane. Commercial planes were too infrequent and too expensive to be of any use. The military planes ran mail/food/commerical shipments up to the town, however there was a hierarchy in place that made it difficult to receive anything other than necessities, especially in the winter. Military shipments took top priority, followed by essential food, and then everything else came later. In the winter the book store had a maximum of 30 books total in stock. If there was a large operation taking place, the stores would occasionally run out of milk and bread, and there were no food production facilities locally except for a meager harvest in the fall. The town outside of the base ran out of food much more often than us, as the base took priority over the town. Most people would order an entire winter's worth of supplies from an independent supplier who had a private plane. For a few thousand dollars we could fill the pantry and a deep freezer (of which each family had at least two) for a few months until the boat could start shipping again. Sometimes we would get food that had been refrozen and had spoilt, but wouldn't notice until a few months down the road, but there was not much we could do about it at the time. Usually though, spoilage was not that much of an issue (especially if things were shipped to us in the late fall when it was already cold).
The first time I lived there I was very young and so I don't remember anything. My parents say that their furniture was so shabby that they the couch had tin cans for legs. There was no cable, there were two channels, the CBC, and some guy who would get shows taped from the Island (which was the mainland for us due to the lack of road) and when he got a shipment he would play whatever he had in no particular order. Later on, the second time I lived there, the times discussed above cable was the only thing that kept us feeling connected to the outside world. Being in isolation, the government would subsidize one flight per person out of the town per year, but it never seemed like enough. It was just a tease, because you knew you had to go back to that shit hole in a week again anyway.
They tell me it's character building. I tell them to shove it up their ass.
