As the cold wreaks havoc in Yellowknife, how does it rank?

Buildings and businesses in Yellowknife continue to suffer this weekend as an extended period of extreme cold enters a second week.

At Aurora College’s downtown Northern United Place campus, students lost heat in their accommodation and the college’s library was said to have closed because of the cold.

Multiple restaurants and bars in the city reported difficulties that forced them to close.

Cai’s Kitchen, a restaurant inside the Nova Inn on Franklin Avenue, published a video showing water gushing from an apparent burst pipe, flooding the dining room floor.

The video was accompanied by a note that read: “We can only wait for the further notice from the hotel when we can open again. Thank you for your support and understanding! STAY WARM!”

The company that operates Cai’s Kitchen said the hotel also suffered water damage.

Meanwhile, the Hungry Wolf restaurant in downtown Yellowknife reported near-daily closures this week because of the cold.

“It’s too chilly in the restaurant for our guests and staff,” the Hungry Wolf stated on Saturday afternoon, the fourth day in a row that it had closed for at least some of the day.

At the Monkey Tree Pub, fans were running in the dining area and patrons were told a pipe had burst.

In Old Town, Bullocks Bistro reported frozen water lines earlier in the week and remained closed on Friday. “Unfortunately, our equipment does not like this extreme cold either,” the restaurant reported.

School buses, transit buses and even the street outreach van – a program designed, in part, to assist vulnerable people caught in the worst of the cold – spent time off the road this week because of the temperature. The outreach van was back in service as of Saturday, the group that runs the van stated online.

A person was found dead outside on Yellowknife’s 52 Street on Friday afternoon. What happened to them has not yet been confirmed.

At Northern United Place, one Aurora College student said they had moved their mattress to their living room floor because it was the only place in which the heating appeared to work.

The student said classrooms also had no heat. They shared a photograph of a thermostat in the building that indicated a temperature of 14C.

Sarah Tilley, Aurora College’s vice-president of student affairs, confirmed the building – which is not managed by the college – had lost one of its boilers on Monday.

“Both boilers are now working and temperatures throughout the building are increasing. However, reheating a building the size of Northern United Place takes time,” Tilley wrote on Friday, acknowledging that temperatures had “varied broadly” in the building during the week.

“Staff are continuing to monitor the situation,” Tilley wrote. “Space heaters have been provided to students living in student housing who have requested them.”

Is this normal?

While the NWT is no stranger to -40C, sustained cold snaps this severe don’t come around every year.

Yellowknife has had eight back-to-back days of lows below -35C, and the forecast suggests at least two more are on the way: Sunday and Monday.

The last four days have all dipped below -40C.

That hasn’t happened since January 2020. Before that, it happened at the end of 2013, in early 2009, and memorably in late January and early February 2008, when Yellowknife suffered a seemingly unending eight straight days of temperatures below -43C.

But what makes this week even more unusual isn’t the city’s minimum temperature – it’s the maximum temperature.

On Thursday, Yellowknife got no warmer than -39.5C. No other day this century in Yellowknife has remained so cold.

You have to go back to 1994 to find another day in the city that stayed as cold, which may explain why this block of weather is having such an effect on businesses, homes and vehicles.

(There’s also the impact of coming into a period like this on the back of such a mild December. Maybe Mother Nature softened us up.)

January 1994, by the way, was cold enough that it went down in history. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it and Yellowknife set a record of 20 consecutive days where the low was -37C or colder.

This January might live long in the memory in North America, too.

While the past week has been eyebrow-raising (and eyebrow-freezing) in Yellowknife, it is at least not far off what you might expect here in winter. But large portions of the US and Canada face similar weather this weekend without being anything like as prepared.

The “Arctic blast,” as it has been dubbed, is causing chaos in some areas and triggered a brief emergency alert on Saturday in Alberta as the cold threatened the provincial power grid.