HALIFAX — In a city where Christmases are often wet and green, many Haligonians were unprepared for a late-fall blast of winter that clogged roads, disrupted travel and knocked out power to thousands of people in the region early Saturday.

“I guess I should have bought a shovel last night,” quipped a young man as he used a frying pan to dig out his car from a large drift.

Few cars were on the street after 30 centimetres of snow fell overnight on the city and parts of Nova Scotia, and at least 20 centimetres fell on southeastern New Brunswick.

Weather forecasts were calling for the snow to continue into Saturday night, bringing between five to 10 centimetres to Nova Scotia, southern New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

All roads in northwestern Nova Scotia were closed for much of the day, including the Trans-Canada Highway between Truro and the New Brunswick border.

The highway reopened late in the afternoon and was “passable with caution,” the province said in a release.

Weather forecasters were cautioning Saturday evening that the highway could expect some heavy flurries up until midnight, with up to 15 centimetres falling at higher altitudes.

That stretch of highway includes the Cobequid Pass, a hilly toll section where an estimated 1,500 travellers were stranded in their vehicles for up to 16 hours Wednesday night by the first storm of the season.

The highway was receiving additional attention over the weekend, after the province’s Transportation minister, Murray Scott, made a public apology for the province’s poor response to the emergency.

Bruce Langille, road conditions co-ordinator for the province, told CTV television news that the high winds and moist snow prompted the decision for closure.

“I think the controls we put in today, in concert with the RCMP and other agencies, provided the best safety we could to the citizens of Nova Scotia,” he said.

An estimated 11,200 homes and businesses were without power at dawn in parts of Nova Scotia and into New Brunswick. There were also some outages in Prince Edward Island.

Margaret Murphy, a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Power, said electricity was restored by 3 p.m.

She said utility crews had to team up with Transportation Department plows to get through roads left impassable by snow whipped by 100 kilometre-an-hour gusts.

NB Power reported that about 1,200 customers were without service during part of the day, most of them in the Shediac, N.B. area.

At Halifax International Airport, some flights were cancelled early Saturday and several others were delayed in what a spokesman called “a moderate to significant disruption.”

Glenda Saulnier, a forecaster with Environment Canada, said the storm was expected to decrease after midnight.

Saulnier said in some areas where temperatures were milder, there would be rain.

She said the strongest winds during the storm were the infamous southeasterlies that buffet the east coast of Cape Breton, with gusts of 120 kilometres per hour.The Halifax Chronicle Herald reported that in Nova Scotia’s Pictou County, early-risers couldn’t believe their eyes when a thunder-and-lightning storm lit up the sky shortly after 4:30 a.m.

In the midst of blizzard conditions outside, a police dispatcher says he counted four lightning flashes so bright that they lit up the inside of his house.