Saturday's weather wallop was not only a record for April - it was close to the most snow that's ever fallen in Cranbrook in a 24-hour period.

The snow began at around 11 p.m. on Friday, April 1 and by the time it stopped on Saturday evening, meteorologists had recorded 26.4 centimetres (10.3 inches) of snow had fallen.

"It's definitely in the top there for sure - the most ever for a day in April, and the most since 1996," said Doug Lundquist, a meteorologist with Environment Canada.

In fact, the last time Cranbrook had more snow fall in one day was on December 29, 1996, when 30.2 centimetres fell.

On Saturday, Cranbrook was caught in a storm system that passed through the northern United States, according to Lundquist.

"There was an upper low pressure system, but more importantly there was a surface low pressure feature that tracked south of Cranbrook, through the Spokane area and into the northern plains states after that. Cranbrook was in the area of wraparound cloud. This is what gave us 26.4 centimetres of snow," said Lundquist.

The snowfall wreaked havoc on the roads around Cranbrook. Between 2:10 p.m. and 11:25 p.m. Saturday, Cranbrook RCMP responded to five accidents. Thankfully, none were fatal, but five people were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries after a two-vehicle collision at 5:10 p.m. on Highway 3/95 near Silver Spring.

"One person was trapped in a vehicle and was extricated by the Cranbrook Search and Rescue team," said Inspector Brian Edmondson.

In another incident at 2:10 p.m., four vehicles slid into the ditch on Highway 3/95 near Eager Hills north of Cranbrook.

"Two of these vehicles overturned, while the other two merely went into the ditch. No one was hurt," said Insp. Edmondson.

There were more incidents, Insp. Edmondson said, but no reports were made to police.

"In all of these instances, drivers advised that they lost control of their vehicle due to the accumulation of snow on the road," he said.

Meanwhile, the record snowfall kept BC Hydro busy repairing 22 outages over the weekend. Around 12,350 properties were affected by the outages, almost 40 percent of BC Hydro's Cranbrook customers.

"It was all due to the storm-type conditions - lots of heavy wet snow and that brought down a lot of trees. Ninety-seven percent of it was trees on the wires," said Diane Tammen, BC Hydro's community relations manager for the East Kootenay.

The largest outages affected 3,388 customers east of Silver Spring Drive between 5:15 and 5:25 a.m., and again from 6:34 to 9:46 p.m. on Saturday.

"The crews were working 24/7 for Saturday and Sunday, just trying to keep up," said Tammen.

Snow ploughs were also out in force as both the City of Cranbrook and Mainroad East Kootenay had every truck on the road.

"We have a private meteorologist who contacted us about 1:30 p.m. on Friday and gave us the heads up," said Mainroad general manager Jim Conley. "We made sure we had the troops ready. All of our trucks and all of our regular employees were out. We also brought in a few extra people just to keep on top of it."

Fortunately, Mainroad had not started converting their snow ploughs for summer tasks, anticipating that this snowy winter wasn't done with us yet.

"This year we have been holding off because we have had so much late weather," said Conley. "We're going to defer probably at least until the end of April before we do those conversions."

Mainroad East Kootenay ploughs the highway through Cranbrook, as well as all of the roads outside Cranbrook's city limits. Inside the city, Cranbrook public works department responded to the call.

"Crews responded as though it was a full-fledged snow event as might be expected in January," said McGowan.

"We anticipate these sorts of things, although we really don't like them. We keep our machinery at a state of readiness until the middle part of May."

McGowan said several people have commented that Mother Nature was a little late with her April Fools' joke this year.

"Mother Nature has her own schedule and a sense of humour that is unique," he said.

In fact, this entire winter has been abnormal for roads crews.

"We've gone through over twice the sand that we put out last year," said Jim Conley. "We're talking over 100,000 tonnes of sand that was put out on the road based on our calculations."