How outdoor workers deal with Edmonton's extreme cold

For letter carriers, bylaw officers, baby it’s cold outside
EDMONTON - Canada Post letter carrier Steven Cowtan is one of those poor souls who has to be outside, no matter how cold it gets.

But even on days when the temperature dips toward -30 C, he doesn’t let the weather get him down.

“I’m Canadian through and through and I love being outside,” said Cowtan, who has been a letter carrier for four years.

“Yes, extreme weather happens. But being outside is why I and a lot of people do this job. We are proud of what we do.”

Cowtan said he dresses in many layers and always has long underwear on. The priority is to keep fingers and toes from freezing. The best thing to do is keep moving and not take any breaks during a shift, because when you go indoors to warm up all the frost that has collected on your clothes melts, making it wet when you head back out.

“We don’t stop if we can help it. We just try to get through the day.”

“My toes have experienced frostbite to the point where they are a little more susceptible to it now.”

New carriers have a harder time, he said, because they are just getting used to their routes and are not accustomed to the cold, so they end up being outside for six to seven hours.

Snow and ice can also make the job challenging.

“You have to hustle to keep warm, and if you’re trying to move fast and you hit a patch of ice, you’re going down. Some have broken their legs from slipping on the ice.”

Letter carriers aren’t the only ones who have to face the cold.

City of Edmonton parking enforcement officer Christina Mayo said her fingers and toes suffer the most in these freezing conditions. She, too, said it’s important to keep moving, but when she has to stop to write a ticket she gets cold. Sometimes after writing one or two tickets she has to go inside to warm up.

“My secret weapon is hot hands, which I put inside my gloves, and the thickest socks I can find,” said Mayo, who is outside for up to six hours a day.

The upside of the cold is that people are less argumentative about getting tickets.

Jon Ruff works as a bag handler at the Edmonton International Airport for Servisair. Layers of clothes and hot chocolate are how he deals with the extreme cold. He said there are periods when he sits inside the crew van while he waits for bags to be brought to the tarmac.

“It’s cold, so there is really no point in complaining about it,” he said. “All you can do is dress properly and hope it passes soon.”

Ruff said the only real problem is the equipment doesn’t want to work because everything is frozen.

The cold spell that hit Alberta this week saw power prices soar after two generation facilities tripped off-line, raising flags for the provincial transmission grid operator Tuesday.

After two days of record-setting electricity consumption in the province, the Alberta Electric System Operator said unplanned outages at TransAlta Corp.’s Keephills 1,387-megawatt coal-fired plant and the 144-megawatt Milner plant had tightened supply.

Power prices in Alberta ran between $800 and $900 per megawatt-hour most of Tuesday because of the outages and high demand.

“We are not in a supply shortfall and we have not had to utilize the generation available to us in our reserve margin,” spokeswoman Dawn Delaney in an email.

Across the province, power demand hit a record 10,609 megawatts on Monday evening.