A day after one of the biggest storms to hit Canada left, the most devastated provinces are calculating the destruction in the aftermath.
The storm named Fiona wreaked havoc on Canada’s eastern seaboard Saturday with wind gusts reaching up to 170 km per hour, sweeping houses into the sea and snapping electric power lines, leaving many without homes and power.
As of Sunday morning, it is estimated that around 254,000 residents in Nova Scotia are still without power, 16,300 in New Brunswick, 82,000 in Prince Edward Island, and 3,600 in Newfoundland.
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“There are likely going to be multiple-day outages for many of our customers, but we’ll continue to work as hard as we can to make sure we safely restore power,” Peter Gregg, Nova Scotia Power’s president and chief executive, said in video briefing Saturday evening.
The calamity took one casualty–a 73-year-old woman in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland died after her residence was swept away by the storm. The town of 4,000 residents was one of the the hardest hit, with the mayor assessing the aftermath as being “like a complete war zone.”
“The magnitude of this storm and what has happened in our community is very, very large,” said Port aux Basques Mayor Brian Button. “This could be months [in rebuilding].”
Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said that Nova Scotia–the first province to sustain the storm’s landfall–initially requested troops and machinery to be deployed to help clean the debris.
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“We said yes, and so they’re being deployed today,” said Blair.
Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador have followed suit, with around 100 troops heading to each of the three provinces.
“The scale of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s unprecedented,” Blair said on Sunday. “There is going to be… several months’ work in restoring some of the critical infrastructure – buildings and homes, rooftops that have been blown off community centers and schools.”
“Our government is standing ready to support provinces with any necessary resources,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who canceled his trip to Japan due to the storm.
Canadian forecasters said Fiona was “the lowest-pressured land-falling storm on record in Canada,” based on an unofficial reading, recording pressure at 931 millibars. While the devastation hasn’t been fully accounted, the storm is set to be one of the country’s costliest calamities in recent history.
“People have seen their homes washed away, seen the winds rip schools’ roofs off,” Trudeau added. “And as Canadians, as we always do in times of difficulty, we will be there for each other.”
Information for this briefing was found via Reuters, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and the sources mentioned. The author has no affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
