Residents, businesses still dealing with Fiona’s wrath
Some residents and businesses in Cape Breton are still making repairs and waiting for answers after last year’s post-tropical storm Fiona.
Cape Breton was one of the hardest hit parts of the province when the storm arrived a year ago.
The small fishing community of Neils Harbour bore the brunt of Fiona’s wind and surf. The main breakwater protecting the community failed, flooding the harbour. It caused millions of dollars in damage.
“We’ve had people in this community for 50 years and they all said the same thing,” said Osborne Burke, general manager of Victoria Co-op Fishery Ltd. “They’ve never seen a storm to the extent that we had with Fiona.”
Burke was away when Fiona came through the community. But residents sent him pictures showing damage to homes, roads and buildings along the water.
‘Luckily, the entire building didn’t collapse’
The business he manages lost part of its wall when a bridge in the community dislodged and crashed through his building. “Luckily, the entire building didn’t collapse and we were able to salvage it and rebuild it,” said Burke.
He estimates that fixing the wall, replacing equipment and shoring up other parts of the business cost more than $8 million. Some repairs are ongoing.
“So, we’re still lingering on our cold-storage portion … getting a replacement generator is a 68-week delivery,” Burke said. “Some of that stuff won’t happen until probably next September as well.”
Burke said waiting for funds through the Hurricane Fiona Recovery Fund meant out-of-pocket expenses to make repairs. Waiting for insurance claims also delayed operations returning to normal.
To prepare for the next intense weather event, the plant has been rebuilt stronger to prevent similar damage,” Burke said.
Old wooden walls in the processing facility were rebuilt with concrete, doors are covered with reinforced steel, and equipment is put into a storage facility at higher ground.
Burke said it’s only a matter of time before the plant and community is put to the test again.
In Sydney, trees that once provided a canopy over roadways instead created a maze of twisted branches and broken stumps.
Bryson Bearden lives in Ashby, and has a different memory of Fiona. He was visiting relatives in Ontario when he got a call on the morning of September 24, 2022.
“We woke up to a phone call to tell us about the wreckage here,” Bearden said.
He opened his phone and found pictures of a massive poplar tree that crushed his garage like a box of Lego, and saw the top of the tree resting on the top of his porch.
Bearden was unable to travel home for a few days due to advisories from government officials to avoid non-essential travel. When he and his fiancée returned home, he was faced with a mess too big to deal with on his own.
“It looked like a jungle, honestly,” he said.
A month after Fiona, Bearden said he was getting little support to remove the tree from his yard. The delay meant all the belongings in the garage that could have been salvaged were covered in mould.
It wasn’t until this August that the new garage was built from the pad up. He said going through insurance and finding contractors proved to be difficult given the scale of damage across the municipality.
