End of her watch
Environment Canada meteorologist Linda Libby retires having learned Islanders have a keen eye towards the sky
If there’s one thing Linda Libby has learned over the years as Environment Canada's chief meteorologist for P.E.I. – Islanders are obsessed with the weather.
“People (on P.E.I.) feel that they need to challenge the weather,’’ said Libby, who has retired from the national weather service, having served as P.E.I.'s weather person since 2006, part of a career that will have spanned 33 years and 333 days.
“Islanders like to do this. In the middle of a blizzard, they like to go out and drive around. Sometimes their priorities are a little skewed.’’
During an interview from her Stratford home, Libby, who is from Ontario, sat down to talk about a career that has seen her watching the weather in various provinces and remote locations all over Canada and the territories.
However, Gander, N.L., was one of the more active locations she has been, she said.
In her first year (1990), there was a snowstorm every three days, and every third storm was a big one.
“Gander is an excellent place to go if you’re a meteorologist looking to get into forecasting . . . it’s where weather ridges go to die.’’
In fact, it was in Gander in 1992 where the term “weather bomb’’ was coined by the industry at the Atlantic Storm Program conference.
It was back in those days Libby can remember have almost nightly conversations with residents about the weather.
She’s also had brushes with Hollywood, handling weather forecasts for on-site crews for movies such as the 2000 flick “Shanghai Noon’’ starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson.
However, she said her experience in P.E.I. has been like none other.
She remembers how tame her first winter was on the Island in 2006, followed by the big ice storm of 2007 that resulted in large portions of the north shore going without power for more than a week.
Shortly after Libby took over on P.E.I., Environment Canada moved its office in Charlottetown from the Dominion Building to the Jean Canfield Building.
She also remembers the “multiple Monday snowstorms’’ in 2010 and how one of the storms resulted in flooding so bad that Lennox Island was cut off from the rest of the province. Libby said people started paying a lot more attention to things like storm surges.
She also recalls post-tropical storm Arthur putting the kibosh on the Blake Shelton concert at the Cavendish Beach Music Festival in 2014.
While Libby talks about the weather passionately, she is quite adamant that it’s not out of an obsession. Libby said she learned from a very young age that she wants to educate people.
“I want people to use information effectively, and I’m not sure they do,’’ she said, referring to forecasts and warnings.
That passion to educate came, at least in part, from her father’s passion for the weather. When they lived in Forest, Ont., near Lake Huron, he would often pack up the family to go stormchasing.
“I did have encounters with the weather growing up,’’ she said, recalling one day when she was in Grade 1 when her father spotted a funnel cloud over the lake, loaded the kids in the car and went for a closer look.
“If it was coming towards us, we were driving away from it. We had a nice basement, which would have been a better option (in that weather),’’ she laughed.
It was scenarios like that that led Libby to a career of warning people about the weather.
“I have a passion for protecting citizens.’’