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The City of Windsor says road crews have started to catch up on snow clearing after 24 hours of heavy snowfall that disrupted travel, closed schools and shut down services across Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent and Sarnia-Lambton.
The city has had a fleet of 21 plows clearing arterial and collector routes, said Stacey McGuire, the city’s executive director of operations.
That includes three devoted to the EC Row Expressway and its ramps.
“One of our challenges last night was that it really didn’t stop snowing after it started,” McGuire said.
“So we were running these routes, and then by the time we got back around to them they’d be snow covered again.”
Environment and Climate Change Canada does not yet have official data on the amount of snow that fell Thursday, according to Warning Preparedness Meteorologist Monica Vaswani.
Flight cancellations, road closures
But unofficial data suggests that 10-15 centimetres had fallen in Windsor by 7 a.m. and 10 in Sarnia.
Vaswani did not have data for Chatham-Kent but said unofficial data from London showed snowfall of 20-30 centimetres by 9 a.m.
Snowy conditions led to flight delays and cancellations at Windsor International Airport.
Ontario Provincial Police closed multiple roads across southwestern Ontario throughout the day due to poor conditions.
A snow-covered Crawford Ave. in Windsor, Jan. 15, 2026. (Kerri Breen/CBC)
That included Highway 401 at Orford Road, which remained closed as of 2:15 p.m.
Police reopened Highway 401 eastbound at Queens Line in Tilbury at around 3:30 p.m. after closing it at around 7 a.m. due to “multiple collisions,” according to the OPP west region X.com feed.
The Towns of Essex and Tecumseh both declared significant weather events Thursday, indicating that conditions were so extreme that their road crews couldn’t meet the province’s minimum standards for road clearing.
Tecumseh officials were also warning residents that transit in the town might be delayed due to snow
The roads maintenance supervisor for the County of Essex said the county has 18 trucks on the road, each with a salting and plowing route that takes two to three hours to complete.
Dan Kraynack said the snow clearing crew had been much busier Wednesday and Thursday than earlier in the winter.
‘We’ve used about three times as much salt’
“If you want to go back to Christmas, it was pretty green outside,” he said. “So the last 24 hours have been obviously definitely 100 per cent worse than [those] days.”
Kraynack said the season has so far been relatively mild compared to winters five to 10 years ago, when there were larger accumulations of snow.
McGuire, however, said winter arrived earlier in Windsor in 2025 than it did in 2024 and there have been more snowfall events, if not more snowfall.
“In November and December of this year, we’ve used about three times as much salt as we did last year, November and December,” she said.
The Victorian Order of Nurses cancelled Meals on Wheels service to Windsor due to poor weather, a spokesperson told CBC.
The Community Support Centre of Essex County also cancelled Meals on Wheels service to parts of Essex County.
“It is volunteer run,” said Paula Ivanitz, the Food Services Co-Ordinator. “We want everyone to be safe.”
School bus service was cancelled across Windsor-Essex on Thursday.
And both the Lambton-Kent District School Board and St. Clair Catholic District School Board closed schools altogether.
The weather office is calling for another weather system to pass through the region on Friday, but this time it will be an Alberta clipper, Vaswani said.
“It is fast-moving and doesn’t usually drop a significant amount of snow,” she said.
“We are expecting anywhere from two to five centimetres in southwestern Ontario when it’s said and done.”
Temperatures will return to seasonal averages on the weekend, Vaswani added, though there may still be what she called “nuisance weather,” such as periods of heavier snowfall.