I lived for two years in Maritime Canada, moving around a fair bit. It has been disturbing to see news footage of ten thousand downed trees and power lines and blocked roads and flooded streets and missing roofs. In communities from Cape Breton to Yarmouth, and Saint John to Sydney. At least the bridges withstood the worst.
Hurricane Fiona hit Nova Scotia with force, worst storm in memory. Most of the province is without power and will be all week. The military is coming to help. My sympathies to my Canadian brothers. The guvernment is matching donations to the Canuck Red Cross for the next month. Stay strong!
AIUI, this is the strongest hurricane ever to hit Canada. The maritime communities were not built to sustain 100+ mph winds. Anyone living near North America’s Atlantic or Gulf coasts should prepare for the inevitable.
I have friends in Nova Scotia that sent out a bulletin that their small fruit orchard survived, but not the big old oak. They are mostly without power (they have a small generator) and have a “relatively tiny” amount of damage due to the wind-felled oak. I am relieved for them and am really glad to hear of the help the Maritimes will receive.
I’m no weather historian, but it’s so strange to me to see the words “Canada” and “Hurricane” in the same sentence. I think it’s wild that the same hurricane hit The Dominican Republic and Nova Scotia.
shrug Back in the festive 60s my parents and grandparents were on my grandfather’s sailboat, moored in Rochester NY sleeping peacefully until they were woken up by being blown into Kingston harbor by a hurricane tail end. They were disconcerted, they hadn’t planned on going to that end of Lake Ontario, they wanted to go to Toronto for the CNE …
I do know that effectively from now on weather is going to be more interesting. I remember the end of the 60s and into the 70s it snowing starting in late October [more than one halloween was done with snow on the ground] and not melting til April - buildup let my brother and I build massive tunnel forts in a snow heap piled up on the back of the house from the 1 level down servant’s laundry yard to the attic with holes to his bedroom window. We would also sled down the snow pile. So, call it 3 feet minimum, drifts of anywhere from 9 to 30 feet depending on if the snow was blown against something solid enough to stop it.
There was a reason Dad arranged for 6 to 8 cords of wood - in a power outage, all those lovely fireplaces in pretty much every room of an 18 room Victorian heap came in handy. Mom also had dad put a really great wood stove in the house we moved into in 1970. More than one bad storm she would cook huge pots of something or another for the neighborhood. [One lovely week we ended up with 4 of the secretarial pool end up sheltering in the house - Danny and I ended up in the spare twin beds down in the basement so they could use our rooms. ]
Sort of reminds me of the “blizzard” in 1990 when we moved to Connecticut - all this hoorah with Scott Haney on Channel 3 having raving panic attacks about the huge weather system coming in. mrAru, his mother a Depression kid from Missouri, my mom a depression kid from Iowa raised us on how to prepare for bad weather. Nope, not a french toast emergency [you know, milk, butter, eggs, toilet paper …] We did the fair thing and stocked up on foods that we could cook on the woodstove in our place here. I make an absolutely killer vegan minestrone that uses nothing but dried or canned ingredients =) We get all ready - even got 5 gallons of gas for the generator even though it wasn’t zippy enough to run the well pump [the one we have now will] but it would run a couple lights and charge the cell phone we had at the time. We got a freakin inch of snow. Everybody was talking about how horrible the storm was. The power flickered a few times and actually went out for about 4 hours. Sigh.