Tropical Storm Earl Makes Landfall in Nova Scotia After Passing Nantucket
Tropical Storm Earl raced across Nova Scotia, nearing the end of its march up the Atlantic coast, after making landfall this morning near the community of Western Head.
“We dodged a bullet,” said Owen Hamlin, a councilor in Queens county and resident of Liverpool, in a telephone interview. “We’re right near Western Head, where the eye of the storm came in. We lost a lot of large trees and had some significant power outages.”
The Queens area has about 12,000 residents, he said.
The storm, which has been losing strength since peaking with winds of 145 miles per hour (233 kph) earlier this week, was forecast to cross the province before reaching Prince Edward Island.
Earl, which is moving to the northeast at 40 mph, is expected to become a storm that no longer has any tropical characteristics tonight, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory. As of 2 p.m. New York time, it was 30 miles south of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph.
Shaune McKinlay, a spokeswoman with the Halifax Regional Municipality, said reports of downed branches and trees, including some blocking roads, were “coming in all the time.” She said a “high number” of power lines were down.
Power Out
Bill Appleby, a meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, said the province was experiencing “some significant bands of rain.”
As of 2:15 p.m. local time, 160,985 customers of Emera Inc.’s Nova Scotia Power Inc. were without power, the company said in an advisory on its website.
Craig Fugate, an administrator with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, said there were reports of isolated and limited flooding along the East Coast from Earl.
“We’re ecstatic” that Earl didn’t make landfall here, he said in a conference call this morning.
As a hurricane, Earl disrupted air and rail travel along the U.S. East Coast yesterday and caused flooding. The system was downgraded to a tropical storm last night, when it was south of Massachusetts’s Nantucket Island, and had maximum sustained winds of 70 mph.
Meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center is tracking three systems, one of them the remains of Tropical Storm Gaston. The center gives Gaston an 80 percent chance of reforming during the next two days.
The second system in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico has a 30 percent chance of becoming a storm and the last, off the African coast, has a 10 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone.
To contact the reporters responsible for this story: Alexandre Deslongchamps in Ottawa at adeslongcham@bloomberg.net; Dan Hart in Washington at dahart@bloomberg.net.
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