Newfoundland mariners moving inland
Scott Strickland built his life by the water.
The 51-year-old Newfoundland man descended from generations of lighthouse keepers who helped guide sailors safely to Port aux Basques, named for the Basque whalers who sought refuge there five centuries ago.
When Strickland’s family moved to the community at the southwestern tip of Newfoundland and Labrador, his father took a job with Marine Atlantic, a ferry service. Strickland, a real estate agent, bought a house with magnificent views - so close to the water that from his back window, it’s “two jumps and into the ocean.”
But after post-tropical storm Fiona pounded Atlantic Canada in September with hurricane-force winds and a ruinous storm surge, Strickland’s view no longer brings comfort. The storm, one of the worst in Canadian history, leveled fishing stages, washed homes away and left many others, including Strickland’s, uninhabitable.
He doesn’t yet know where he’ll relocate, but there’s one certainty: It won’t be anywhere near the water.
“Being on the water was exactly where we felt at home,” Strickland said. “But now, that’s all changed. Now, there’s scars - deep scars that affect you every time you look out.”
Months after Fiona, the people of windswept Port aux Basques and other former fishing communities in the province are grappling with emotionally fraught decisions, including where and how to rebuild in a world where climate change could make intense storms more frequent.
In Newfoundland, where 90 percent of residents live within six miles of the rocky coastline, picturesque oceanside towns with brightly colored homes are not only the stuff of tourism campaigns but also are a way of life. But for some, the sea that has long powered their communities is now a cause of trepidation.
In hard-hit Port aux Basques, some of the 3,500 residents are debating whether to move farther inland.
Days after Fiona hit, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey told reporters that climate change would fuel more such storms. He said he hadn’t spoken to anyone who wanted to rebuild where they had been.
“Oftentimes, these people didn’t choose to build there in the first place,” Furey said. “Our province is beautiful because it was settled this way historically and culturally out of economic requirements to have the fishing stages and the houses close to the water.
“Times have changed and we need to change with them.”
René Roy, the editor in chief of the Wreckhouse Weekly, Port aux Basques’s newspaper, said Fiona “unquestionably” changed the relationship townspeople have with the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some are considering a future elsewhere. Others already left.
It’s not just the landscape that’s changed, he said, but the people.
“People are saying, ‘I loved going out on my back deck or going out on my lawn and looking out over these rocks at the ocean and seeing the busters come over the rocks and spray up 10 feet in the air,’” said Roy.