Metropolis Reality Forums - Winnipeger's witness hurricane's wrath

Sponsored by: The Fans!

Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register.
Nov 25^th, 2024, 4:43am

Upcoming Premiere Dates:
Survivor 23, Season premiere
Thursday, September 14 (8:00-9:30 PM, ET/PT) on CBS

Metropolis Reality Forums Ť Winnipeger's witness hurricane's wrath ť

   Metropolis Reality Forums
   Off-Topic Forums
   In the News (Moderators: lakelady, yesteach, MediaScribe, Bumper, Isle_be_back)
   Winnipeger's witness hurricane's wrath

Previous topic | New Topic | Next topic »

Pages: 1

Add Poll

Notify of replies

Send Topic

Author

Topic: Winnipeger's witness hurricane's wrath (Read 201 times)

MzWings
ForumsNet Member

Praying for FN members/family health & happiness

Gender:

Posts: 0

Winnipeger's witness hurricane's wrath
« on: Sep 30^th, 2003, 1:17pm »

Quote

Modify

'We were at ground zero'

By Carol Sanders

A boater checks out sailboats tossed about by hurricane Juan

A charter bus full of Winnipeggers and other western Canadians touring the fall colours of the Maritimes got a little more than they bargained for Sunday night when they ran into hurricane Juan.

"They got their money's worth this time, that's for sure," laughed Fehr-Way Tours bus driver George Benger of Beausejour when reached on his cellphone in New Brunswick last night.

"We were in it -- we were at ground zero."

Benger and his 48 passengers -- mostly seniors -- were forced to leave Halifax a day early yesterday after the fiercest hurricane to hit Canada in decades knocked out power in the Nova Scotia capital.

At least three people were killed in the storm, which hit land shortly after midnight and roared over the Nova Scotia capital with gusts reaching 140 kilometres an hour.

A police officer inspects an ambulance in which the driver was killed

The tour group arrived in Halifax at about 4 p.m. Sunday and just had time to get settled in a hotel before the full force of the hurricane hit.

"It basically started off just windy and a little drizzly, then around 10:30 p.m. the lights started losing power. We could see (electrical) transformers blowing up all over the place."

Hundreds of soldiers began a massive cleanup of Halifax's tree-littered streets yesterday and smaller teams were moving through the city's north end, cleaning up debris from some of the thousands of trees felled by the powerful winds.

Defence Minister John McCallum said at least 600 troops could be deployed in the Nova Scotia capital to help clean up from the storm that cut a destructive swath through the province.

The cleanup was expected to take weeks and officials had yet to compile a damage estimate.

About 180,000 homes and businesses across the province were still without power late in the day, primarily in and around Halifax, and officials warned it could be at least Thursday before it was completely restored.

At the height of the hurricane, more than 300,000 homes were without electricity, power officials said.

Yesterday, Benger and his passengers ventured out to see the aftermath.

"There's so much damage from fallen trees," said Benger, 38. "We managed to get out to Peggy's Cove and there's hundreds and hundreds of trees on the side of the road, on people's cars and people's houses," said the bus driver before handing the cell phone to one of his passengers.

"It's just unbelievable," said Grant Thompson from Quesnel, B.C.

"The blowdown is for miles each way from Halifax," the retired engineer said before giving the phone back to Benger and returning to his seat on the bus headed down the highway to Saint John.

DARREN PITTMAN / CANADIAN PRESS
Curious pedestrians walk past a sidewalk full of debris in Halifax, yesterday, in the aftermath of hurricane Juan.

Prairie windstorms can't hold a candle to the force of a hurricane, said Benger.

"It's just an amazing sight to see so much destruction. We can't touch this," the Manitoban said.

He was impressed that Maritimers didn't waste any time before pitching in to clean up the mess. "The people of Halifax are already cutting up the trees and were piling up the branches on the boulevard," he said last night.

Nova Scotia Premier John Hamm said the province was well-prepared for Juan.

"I'm happy with the weather forecasting, it was very accurate," Hamm told CBC-TV. "I'm happy with what emergency measures did for us in the hours and minutes leading up to the storm.

"Obviously, there was nothing we could do to prevent the storm, but we were ready for it and the response was very, very good."

Along Halifax's touristy waterfront, people walked on damaged boardwalks and wharfs littered with crumbled Styrofoam, shards of wood and starfish hurled from the harbour by the hurricane's force.

PAUL CHIASSON / CANADIAN PRESS
A father and his son in Halifax pose for a photograph next to an uprooted tree that lifted up an entire lawn.

"It's bad," said Jim Terrio of the Halifax Waterfront Development Corp. as he stood in driving rain on the waterfront.

"I've never seen nothing like this and I grew up on the water. This one caught us with our pants down -- we got it really bad here."

John Rossiter, a 31-year-old paramedic, died when a tree fell on an ambulance in Halifax. Two other unidentified people were killed in separate incidents in Enfield, N.S., and Hantsport, N.S., when trees crushed their cars.

Two fishermen from Caraquet, N.B., disappeared when a boat carrying a load of wood was swamped off Quebec's Anticosti Island. The boat's captain was able to get to shore safely, but there was no sign of the others.

In downtown Halifax, boulders the size of garbage cans were hurled from the water's edge like pebbles. Sections of paved parking lots buckled and sections of wharf were thrown from the pitching waters and smashed to the ground.

Dead or dying seagulls littered walkways and the decks of battered boats.

The category 1 hurricane -- the weakest rating on the Saffir-Simpson scale -- was downgraded to a tropical storm shortly after making landfall in the Halifax area.

Still, its ferocity impressed Haligonians, who weathered a less-severe hurricane Hortense in 1996 and normally regard the usual series of fall storms with almost jaded contempt.

TIM KROCHAK / CANADIAN PRESS
Nova Scotia fishermen work to reassemble their shattered wharf while trying to get to their sunken fishing boat.

The city was under a state of emergency yesterday morning, as the weather brought heavy rain and thunder, and then sun.

"We are encouraging non-essential personnel to stay home and let us deal with cleaning up," said Mayor Peter Kelly.

About 200 patients had to be evacuated from one building in the sprawling Victoria General Hospital complex in Halifax after the wind ripped off sections of the roof.

Hundreds of residents were briefly evacuated from low-lying areas.

In nearby Dartmouth, fierce winds tore up an apartment building's roof and collapsed a firewall in a hallway, temporarily trapping three people inside. No one was injured.

At Halifax International Airport, the peak wind gust was pegged at 143 km/h at 1 a.m. -- about an hour after Juan made landfall.

-- with files from Canadian Press
[email protected]

« Last Edit: Sep 30^th, 2003, 1:44pm by MzWings »

IP Logged

"Senility Prayer"...God grant me...
The senility to forget the people I never liked
The good fortune to run into the ones that I do
And the eyesight to tell the difference."

Pages: 1

Add Poll

Notify of replies

Send Topic


Previous topic \| New Topic \| Next topic »