Recovery mode in Newfoundland
NEWFOUNDLANDERS ASSESSING DAMAGE AFTER FIERCE STORM
Residents in Newfoundland and Labrador spent Sunday taking stock of the damage caused by a fearsome windstorm that roared through the province a day earlier.
Utility crews worked around the clock over the weekend to restore power to the tens of thousands of customers who were left without electricity.
Newfoundland Power said 13,500 customers were without electricity Sunday afternoon, down from 20,000 earlier in the day. The utility said at one point on Saturday 70,000 customers were affected by outages.
The utility estimated that most residents would be back on the grid by Sunday evening, but isolated outages could last into today.
St. John’s resident Phonse Fagan said he slept fully clothed under six blankets to stay warm after the heat and lights went out at his house Saturday afternoon. A shrieking gale had been picking up speed for the previous two hours when the power failed, he said as he sat Sunday reading in a warming centre at St. John’s City Hall.
“I was doing a few chores around the house and I just noticed the sound was very unusual,” he said. “The sound of the wind was just roaring through the whole neighbourhood,” he said.
Fagan said there was flying debris from split trees.
“I’ve been talking to people who said siding was blown off their houses,” he added
Around St. John’s, damage was evident Sunday as a lengthy cleanup began. Slate tiles from a downtown church were blown into an alley 100 metres away, roofs were partly off several houses and buildings and a home in nearby Torbay had its top floor blown off.
Salvation Army Maj. John Goulding helped co-ordinate warming centres in St. John’s and Mount Pearl for dozens of people who needed refuge.
“It was very powerful,” he said of the storm that knocked out hydro to his house in Mount Pearl for several hours.
Goulding said the damage may not be on par with hurricane Igor in September 2010, which brought torrents of rain over much of southeastern Newfoundland. Still, he said, it was a reminder of nature’s power.
“I was out briefly yesterday doing some personal chores and I had great difficulty standing up,” he said of trying to walk in the blasts of wind. “It’s something you really had to experience to imagine what was happening.”