Face of Nation : As post-tropical storm Dorian moves its way through western Newfoundland, after walloping the Maritime provinces, high winds are knocking trees into power lines and toppling fences Sunday afternoon.
Environment Canada still has a hurricane warning in effect for much of the western and southwestern regions of Newfoundland, as well as the south coast of Labrador. Wind warnings were extended late Sunday morning to include the Bonavista region.
Gusts up to 150 km/h should be expected in coastal areas, according to the latest forecast. “That’s going to be the big issue of the day,” says Doug Mercer, senior meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre.
The wind and possibility of storm surges later on Sunday are the main points of concern, Mercer said, as the storm’s centre moves through the Strait of Belle Isle by around 3 p.m. NT.
The storm is tracking its way over the eastern Gulf of St. Lawrence Sunday morning, before moving up to the Northern Peninsula in the afternoon. In Stephenville and along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, people were reporting increasingly gusty winds, as well as rain starting late Sunday morning.
“You’re going to have a band of southwesterlies that are forecast to be hurricane force, and as the storm moves up into the Strait and nears the coast, those winds are going to be picking up,” he said.
“The strongest winds, I would expect, would be somewhere near Corner Brook, moving up toward the Parson’s Pond-Hawke’s Bay region, then it may drop off a little bit as it gets up toward St. Anthony.” Those high winds gave Don Rideout a bit of a scare overnight, when a neighbour called to say there was a broken window at his mother’s house nearby.
Rideout said the neighbour spotted a curtain blowing out through a broken window, so Rideout went over to see what had happened.
“I thought it was a bridge at first or a patio on the ground by the side of mom’s house there, so I went on inside and when I went in there was glass everywhere and the window was all gone,” Rideout said.
His mother, 89, had taken her hearing aid out to go to sleep, and hadn’t realized what had happened. “She was wondering why the bed was shaking so much,” Rideout said, of the wind gusting through his mother’s house.
Rideout took a closet door from his mother’s room and boarded up the broken window from the inside, waiting until daylight to get someone to come and seal it more safely from the exterior. In the meantime, Rideout said the debris that had struck his mother’s house was from a neighbour’s garage.
“The roof blew off and came over and hit the side of mom’s house, and had all kinds of damage on the siding there and busted out the window, too,” he said.
Rideout lives along the Port aux Basques shoreline, and had worried about the storm surges at high tide around 7 a.m. NT. But, he said, the surges weren’t bad; he did notice there’s a fair amount of scattered debris along the coast.
