LES SUETES WINDS BECOMING MORE COMMON
Gerard Miller can list many reasons why he is happy to live in the Margaree Valley.
The virtues of living far from the water, nestled in Fordview, are driven home when the carpenter opens his door and hears a noise coming from the hills all around.
“You hear this hum in the mountains and you know it’s blowing something fierce from the southeast in Belle Cote,” said Miller.
“We don’t even feel that wind here, but you can hear it and you know they’re getting it.
Miller has been hearing the ominous call of the feared Les Suetes wind more often lately.
The winds are created when a southeast or easterly wind is driven up onto the Cape Breton Highlands. The wind is compressed and accelerated at 400 metres above sea level before it whips down on the island’s west coast to tear its way through communities around Cheticamp and Grand Etang.
And the winds are getting more common.
“It seems we get them every 10 days or so now,” said Charles Roach, a 70-year- old resident of Point Cross.
“It used to be it was the southeast wind, but now we get an easterly wind with these gusts that you think are going to tear your house apart.”
According to Saltwire Network’s chief meteorologist Cindy Day, the anecdotal observations of local residents can be backed up by weather records.
And as it happens, the increased frequency of Les Suetes winds is a side effect of our milder winters.
A high pressure system known as the Bermuda high has been sitting farther north since the mid-1990s. It has forced the jet stream well north of us.
So while storms coming up the coast used to pass between Sable Island and mainland Nova Scotia, they’re now more likely to travel up the Bay Fundy.
“That track brings a southeast wind ahead of the low as it comes off the coast,” said Day.
“It’s that southeast wind that gets funneled and comes crashing down off the plateau.”
Local residents get a bit of warning before that freight train of air comes for them.
“Usually there’s a dead calm for about 10 hours before one of those winds,” said Roach.
“And our mountains are in sharper focus — the optical density of the air seems to change. You can hear echoes resonating a long distance.”
Though the winds are more frequent and more easterly than southeast, Roach said they also don’t tend to last as long — about five hours rather than 10 hours.
But five hours is enough for them to damage a home.
As a carpenter working in Cheticamp, Miller is accustomed to the local unwritten building code.
Shingles are double nailed down on roofs, siding laps never face the southeast, spiral nails are preferred for attaching everything over the smooth bored ones used everywhere else.
“I was working down there on a building one time and we had nailed an eight-foot-long two-byfour on the roof,” said Miller.
“We left it sticking over the edge of the roof about a foot to help us climb up. We’d nailed it every two and a half feet with three and a half inch spiral nails. Anyway, one of those winds came up and when we came back it had ripped that two-by-four right off through the nail heads. You don’t dare go out when it’s blowing like that. It’s just nasty.”