Eastern Canada woke up to Fiona on Saturday, reports Radio-Canada : “Authorities are already reporting several damages and half a million homes are plunged into darkness”.
The channel adds that of the four provinces in the region, Nova Scotia has been the hardest hit so far: “we recorded 75 to 125 mm of rain in some areas” with sustained winds that reached 186 km/h at the Confederation Bridge connecting New Brunswick to the island province of Prince Edward Island. The CBC reports that residents of Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, had to evacuate their homes and that “multiple residences” were destroyed by the waters.
Canada hit hard
The regional information network Saltwire reports extensive damage in Nova Scotia County of Pictou: “roads and sidewalks in various locations are currently impassable”.
“The conditions are nothing like we have ever seen”, tweeted the police of Charlottetown, capital of Prince Edward Island. For its part, the Canadian Hurricane Center tweet :
With an unofficial pressure recorded at Hart Island of 931.6 Mb, this makes the lowest storm ever recorded in Canada”.
The specialty channel Weather Media doesn’t hesitate to call Fiona a ‘monster’. Sor chief meteorologist André Monette explains: “The unique element is mainly that it goes from a major hurricane to an incredible post-tropical storm without losing momentum. This is certainly a storm that deserves the strongest adjectives at all stages of its entry into Canadian waters”.
The agency Reuters reminds that “Fiona had already struck a series of Caribbean islands earlier in the week, killing at least eight people and knocking out power for almost all of Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million people”. The climatologist of the Canadian Western University, Gordon McBean affirms to the chain Global News that the strength of Hurricane Fiona heralds an intense future for Canada as climate change worsens:
I think the evidence I’ve seen is that the number of hurricanes may not increase, but the number of intense category four and five hurricanes will actually increase in intensity.”