Jan. 22 was a first for the Sudbury Student Services Consortium — it cancelled school buses in the morning, but still planned to run them in the afternoon.
Why? The organization's executive director, Renee Boucher, said she made the decision to cancel school bus transportation because of the extreme cold temperatures, which were hovering at -33 C in the early morning.
She explains that while buses manufactured over the past five years are more fuel-efficient, they don't handle the cold very well.
“So we have more mechanical breakdowns when we do have very cold weather,” Boucher said.
But with daytime highs expected to reach -22 C, the consortium decided it was feasible to run the school buses in the afternoon.
Because buses are normally cancelled due to snow or freezing rain — this is actually only the second time extreme cold has resulted in a cancellation — it isn't usually possible to run buses in just the afternoon.
That's because when buses are cancelled due to snow or freezing rain, the roads usually aren't in good enough shape by the afternoon to run them, Boucher said.
@heidi_ulrichsen