CALAIS, Maine — WQDY-FM announcer Bill Conley said something on the air Monday morning that he never had said before.
Along with the usual slew of school and other closings due to the snowstorm that dumped up to 2 feet of snow in parts of Maine Sunday night and Monday, he announced that the post office in neighboring St. Stephen, New Brunswick, was closed for the day.
Conley said this was the first time he’d ever announced that a post office closed because of bad weather. He said the telephone call Monday morning came from a representative of the local post office saying the facility would not open even though some workers already were on the job. The familiar Canada Post trucks were parked.
Even the town’s mayor couldn’t mail a letter Monday. St. Stephen Mayor Jed Purcell said his first hint that something was different was when he arrived at the post office Monday morning and the steps weren’t shoveled. Then he saw a note on the window indicating the facility was closed.
“I couldn’t understand that myself,” he said of the closed post office. “I went over just a few minutes ago to mail a letter and it was closed due to the inclement weather.”
The storm dumped 12 to 20 inches of snow Down East, according to the National Weather Service, and similar amounts in nearby New Brunswick.
“Visibility is at zero percent and of course because of the snow accumulation the driveways are not cleared so it is very hard for the mail couriers to deliver the mail,” Canada Atlantic Post spokeswoman Genevieve LaTour explained Monday afternoon about the St. Stephen closure.
Other post offices in Charlotte County, including St. Andrews and St. George, remained open, which LaTour said was a local decision.
“In St. Stephen they had assessed the situation and decided that it was not safe,” she said. “And of course at Canada Post safety is a top priority.”
While St. Stephen postal workers got an unexpected holiday, it was business as usual for post offices in Washington County, where “neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” as the motto on a New York City postal facility proudly states.
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