the storm with no name

Well well well, that was quite the blast we received on Monday night. It probably does not reflect well on Environment Canada that they’ll spend a week inciting panic in anticipation of a monster hurricane that turns out to be an hour of drizzle and a stiff breeze, yet no one I’ve spoken to had any idea this storm was coming. It was about the worst I’ve ever experienced and while we had minor property damage (our chimney fell off the roof and our composter blew away, believe it or not), we were very lucky compared to many of our neighbours.

Our next door neighbours lost a whole bunch of shingles, a chunk of their shed’s roof and several big trees, but at least a power line didn’t fall on their house, as it did further down the street. And thank goodness one of those big old trees didn’t slice through their house, as happened in New Minas, a town not far from here. Our particular little neighbourhood was also lucky in that our power and telephone service were restored after only 15 hours; my parents (who live five minutes away) went without for 43 hours.

This is an example of what an awful lot of trees around here look like now:

 Or they look like this one, just down the street:

Here’s a shot of the telephone poles along our street:

Between our house and the area in this shot, the poles snapped the other way and the live wires were lying on the road. I was tempted to stop and whip out the camera, but thought the Mountie sitting there might not approve.

Oh, and the super-mailboxes (are they still called that?) were toppled:

Here’s another one of leaning poles, not far from my parents’ house:

And the traffic light at the intersection was gone. Note the dangling wires. I wonder whose window it crashed through.

Look carefully and behind the trees you’ll see a collapsed barn:

Church Street was blocked by a fallen tree:

And further up Middle Dyke Road, the metal roofing of a barn was peeled back like a tin of sardines:

Tree meets wires:

And road sign meets ground:

These shots, from our immediate area, are a fraction of the local damage. In New Minas, the golf course reportedly lost about a hundred big trees and a trailer park had to be evacuated mid-storm because the roofs were being blown off and/or being crushed by falling trees. The roof of a funeral parlour in Kentville was blown away and a young man was almost crushed in his car by a falling tree in Windsor. In our own village, the roof was torn off an unoccupied building, causing so much damage the whole thing was bulldozed on Tuesday.

The worst part is this storm didn’t even have a name. In Nova Scotia, everything is Hurricane Juan this and Hurricane Juan that, but here in the Valley, we have nothing. It’s “that thing on Monday night.” Or “wow, that was a hell of a whatever-it-was, wasn’t it?” How will we reminisce with something so unwieldy? Without a snappy name everyone recognizes? I demand satisfaction, Environment Canada.

6 thoughts on “the storm with no name”

  1. All I can say is WOW!!!!! I guess you should consider yourselves lucky that there was no more damage to your place than there was.

  2. Down in Yarmouth, it’s called a good’ol “Blow”. But the Valley isn’t used to these kinds of sustained winds. Can’t blame Environment Canada, they called it.

  3. Hey Lori! Happy birthday! I couldn’t find your e-mail address to send you a message, so I hope you get this. Thanks for the xmas card; hope you guys had a good one. Please send me your e-mail address when you get the chance.

  4. But they didn’t predict it was going to be that bad, did they? Earlier in the day, I’d heard to expect winds of 50 km/h, gusting to 80. What we got was WAY worse than that.

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