Highway Hotline has broken its previous record for yearly page visits, after multiple storms have made their presence known in Saskatchewan.
Besides the two that have been predominant in the last few weeks in the southeast and southwest, Saskatchewan saw storms that often led to deteriorating road conditions.
Their record was broken thanks to those storms, as people were often checking their interactive map for up-to-date road conditions.
Steve Shaheen, with the ministry of highway's communications department, says that "the hotline has received nearly 13 million hits over the last year. That's April 1 to March 31 of 2022. That's more than double the amount of hits we typically receive in a year."
That represents a big increase for the Highway Hotline, which sees spikes from severe weather.
"It would be more than double. When we look at these things, typically what happens is we see a huge spike in the numbers for the hotline when we receive some weather-related events. There were several large weather-related events over the past year that resulted in not only road closures but also travel not recommended warnings."
That count especially rose this month, even though we're only around two-thirds of the way through.
"Citizens, of course, when they see that there's inclement weather coming through they tend to check in with the hotline. Event his April so far, the hotline hit approximately 1.2 million page views, that's of course climbing because of the weather system that is passing through today."
Around 900,000 of those page views came from the system that came in last week and more are likely on the way thanks to other systems rolling in.
Thu, Apr 18, 6:00 PM
Seasonal, Labour
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