Well, that was fun. Now we get to pay for it.

As spring arrived this week to blessedly, and at least temporarily, beat back polar vortex incursions that made this one of the cruelest winters in memory, Toronto can now begin to tally the financial costs of the season.

And they are chilling.

From its plethora of potholes, to its icy assaults on power lines, water mains, trees and transit, the winter wreckage has set city and hydro services back big time.

While officials have not yet calculated a cumulative price tag, the seasonal toll could be well in excess of $100 million above normal levels (though much of that could come out of a provincial relief fund).

And less than a third of the way into the year, the weather has already placed many annual budgets under stress.

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Start with the pitted roads, for instance.

Though Toronto saw only 125 centimetres of snow between November and spring’s March 20 debut — less than the 133-centimetre winter average — the Arctic cold took an extraordinary toll.

“The real story has been the temperatures,” says City of Toronto transportation director Peter Noehammer. “I’ve counted five separate occasions where we’ve dipped below minus 20C.”

“That’s very unusual for Toronto . . . we might get to (bouts of) minus 20 every other winter.”

Those recurring cold snaps ruptured road surfaces across town. City crews have already filled some 85,000 potholes since Jan. 1.

Over the same period last year, that pothole count was at 53,000. This year marked a 60-per-cent increase.

“Normally we’d have anywhere from about 20 to 25 crews during the winter months attending to potholes, but sometimes we’ve been up to 40 to 50 crews this year,” Noehammer says.

It’s the cost of those extra crews that will likely crater this year’s pothole budget.

“Annually we’d spend about $3.5 million on potholes . . . to typically fill 170,000 to 180,000,” Noehammer says. “So we’re already at about half of that.”

If the rest of the year just goes as normal, Noehammer says, pothole costs will almost certainly spill over budget.

The city’s winter road maintenance budget also took a pounding, Noehammer says.

The snow this winter often came in concentrated dumps, meaning plows were called out a disproportionate number of times.

Most winters, the city largely makes do with its salting fleet, which will mobilize 40 to 50 times to deal with light dustings of snow.

“We would send the plows out about four to six times on an average winter when we have some deep snow to plow,” says Noehammer.

Last winter it was three times. This winter the plows went out 11 times.

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Those snowfalls have already helped eat some $50 million out of the city’s $85-million winter roads budget, which runs from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31.

That includes a special $2.2-million snow removal project in mid-February to cut back banks that were blocking parking spots, bike lanes and pedestrian crossings and obscuring visibility at intersections.

Although Noehammer still enjoys budget room, he says any further snow in March or April — or an intense start to next winter — could push his department into a special maintenance reserve fund that has not been tapped for years.

Meanwhile, the city’s 6,000-kilometre water main system, much of it ancient and eroding cast-iron stock, was hemorrhaging, says Mario Crognale, director of district operations with Toronto Water.

Between Jan. 1 and March 20, Crognale says, his department serviced 1,033 main breaks, most caused by deep frost pressures on cracked or fragile piping.

“By comparison, in the same period last year, a fairly heavy year as well, we had 650,” he says.

Indeed, Crognale says his department responded to 1,500 water main breaks in all of 2013, a total that’s certain to be surpassed and then some this year.

Each break runs an average $8,000 to expose, repair and re-cover.

This year, the department has already spent some $8 million on water main repairs, just $2 million less than the city’s annual average. And while he has no dedicated funding for the breaks, the busted mains are almost certain to put pressure on the department’s overall operating budget.

Last week, Toronto Hydro pegged its response costs for December’s ice storm at $13.8 million, adding another $900,000 in lost revenue.

That pre-Christmas plastering took out power to some 300,000 customers, many of whom were in the dark for days or even weeks. The utility estimated its reconnection costs at $1 million a day.

Much of the hydro line damage resulted from falling branches and trees, downed in an arboreal apocalypse that destroyed an estimated 20 per cent of the city’s canopy.

The whining crescendos of chainsaws and chippers serenaded were heard for weeks afterwards, with officials pegging cleanup and related costs in a March 7 report to council at some $69 million, spread between the parks and forestry and the waste management departments.

Across all affected departments, officials estimate the ice storm set the city back some $86.5 million in total. A March 19 council resolution directed the city manager to seek financial relief from a provincial ice storm fund, which is expected to cover virtually all of those expenditures.

Winter ice and cold also played havoc with TTC services, especially with the aging streetcar fleet.

Icing in the pneumatic lines that operate doors and brakes on the vehicles, many more than three decades old, took as much as a third of the streetcars out of service during some frigid rush hours.

The commission has not calculated the costs of these breakdowns in terms of repairs and lost fares. But added together with increased power and plowing expenditures, the system spent $3 million to $4 million more than it would during a typical winter, spokesperson Danny Nicholson says.

The city’s housing and homeless services also suffered from plunging temperatures, facing 36 extreme cold alerts this winter, compared to just nine last year.

Spokesperson Patricia Anderson says each of those alerts cost her department an average of $5,500, which includes free TTC token distribution, pushing this year’s expenditures towards the $200,000 mark.

“We don’t actually have a budget for extreme cold weather alerts, we just do it,” Anderson says. “We just find the money.”