Despite all the predictions of a major storm on the weekend, Mission, for the most part, escaped any serious problems.
While winds did gust on Wednesday and Friday, causing power outages to thousands of homes, the big storm expected on Saturday never came.
That was a relief to Mission fire chief Dale Unrau.
“The Mission Fire Rescue Service did a lot of pre-planning for the three storms expected to come through from Wednesday to Sunday,” he explained.
“We had our emergency operations centre all set up and ready to go. We had sent some notifications out, both on the district website and internally to staff, on how to prepare for the storm event that would be occurring.”
Unrau said fortunately the storm centre was about 30 km west of where it was initially predicted to be and that meant Mission missed all the winds and the majority of the rainfall that was in the final storm.
He said there were far fewer calls than expected.
“We had some winds on Wednesday evening and Friday that did lead to a few electrical events for us, with wires down.”
Most of the emergency calls were for trees touching wires or trees that had toppled and brought down the wires completely.
Unrau said Keystone Avenue had a fairly large section of lines down.
Much of the Lower Mainland also escaped the remnants of Typhoon Songda, which ended up tracking farther north, bringing the fiercest winds to areas like Howe Sound and the Sunshine Coast on Saturday night.
Authorities took no chances, with BC Ferries cancelling sailings Saturday afternoon and BC Hydro crews scrambling to restore electricity where trees fell across power lines. By noon Sunday, barely 1,000 Lower Mainland/Sunshine Coast homes were still without power, plus just over 800 on Vancouver Island.