It was a chilly welcome back to school today for thousands of School District 43 students who trudged along icy sidewalks to get to class on the first day after the winter vacation.
Much of the school district remained under a blanket of white because of the New Year's Eve snow storm, with schools at higher elevations, including those on Westwood Plateau, among the hardest hit.
School driveways were cleared and communications manager Peter Chevrier said the district's small crew was working hard to clear pathways to schools.
"The crews are doing their best, not only the municipal crews but we do do our best to help people get in and do our sidewalks," he said.
At Hampton Park elementary school on the Plateau, the driveway was plowed, leaving five-foot drifts of snow in spots, and a pathway to the school was cleared. Meanwhile, city parks workers were salting the sidewalk outside the school and nearby.
Over the weekend, crews cleared, sanded and salted major thoroughfares in the Tri-Cities but many smaller residential streets were still icy by the beginning of the work week, some community mailboxes appeared snowed in and many cars were buried under snow drifts.
At one house along Parkway Boulevard in Coquitlam, the snow damaged a solarium.
Chevrier said the district will do its best to clean sidewalks and pathways but in many cases the snow has frozen and, "you only have so much staff to go around."
Meanwhile, Pinetree secondary students arrived at school Tuesday morning to find it briefly closed until the Coquitlam fire department declared that a smell that had been detected in the building was not a fire and gave the all-clear. The school re-opened at 8:20 a.m., according to Chevrier.
The snow could possibly return Friday, according to the long range weather forecast
