East Coast cleans up mess of weather bomb
STORM FLOODED ROADS AND BATTERED BUILDINGS
The weather bomb that went off in the Maritimes late Thursday and kept detonating early Friday left plenty of ugly fragments in Wade Woodbury’s backyard.
As he emerged from his home along the eastern edge of Halifax Harbour, cane in hand, Woodbury surveyed the damage, then marvelled at powerful waves crashing over a massive rock wall only 12 metres from his back door, howling winds hurling salt spray in his eyes.
“She was loud, very loud — like thunder,” said Woodbury, wearing a grey parka and a blue tuque as the temperature hovered around the freezing mark.
A storm surge late Thursday breached the wall, shoving a collection of lawn furniture, garbage cans, firewood and the entire fire pit into a tangled heap.
Woodbury, a resident of Eastern Passage for more than 20 years, said the winter storm kept him up most of the night as the electricity flickered on and off.
“I got up and wandered around — not outdoors, mind you.”
Work crews fanned out across the region Friday to deal with the mess left behind by hurricane-force winds, flooded coastal roads and downed power lines that, at one point, left more than 110,000 homes and businesses in the dark — most of them in Nova Scotia, the province that endured the strongest winds.
The brawniest gusts were recorded in Cape Breton, where a 170-kilometreper-hour blast streaked through the rural area of Grand Etang, known for producing powerful winds.
In the Halifax area, which weathered its share of power outages, siding was ripped off some homes, limbs were torn from trees and the roof was ripped from at least one home in Dartmouth.
Dominic Fewer of Nova Scotia’s Emergency Management Office said some roads were washed out and others littered with rocks and debris caused by storm surge and heavy rains.
Among the roads still closed Friday was the winding, narrow oceanside lane into a little enclave of five homes in Purcell’s Cove, across from Point Pleasant Park in Halifax harbour.
“That’s the only road. We’re sitting here till we get dug out,” said Andrew Murphy, an accountant who was unable to get downtown. “There’s no way through that.”
Usually, he and his neighbours just clean the mess up themselves, but this storm “flipped pieces of pavement the size of little cars,” he said.
“I’ve lived here for 23 years, and at first the road would wash out once every three or four years. Now it does that three or four times a year. But this is probably the worst one we’ve had since hurricane Juan 14 years ago.”
Videos posted to social media Thursday night showed waves from Halifax harbour crashing against the walls of a couple of waterfront restaurants. And as the harbour heaved, jets of spray shot up between the slats on the city’s boardwalk.