Power outages and minor damage as post-tropical storm Lee passes over Pictou County

NEW GLASGOW, N.S. — While sustained damage throughout Pictou County due to Lee was minimal, up to 15,200 customers experienced power outages as Lee passed through the county on Saturday afternoon.

Nova Scotia Power stated in a news release that restoration efforts started properly throughout Pictou County on Sept. 17, and by Monday, Sept. 18 at 3 P.M., 99 per cent of customers had their power restored. The main causes of the outages were trees coming in contact with powerlines and tropical storm force winds.

The one official weather station in Pictou County, Caribou Point, went down before Lee hit Saturday afternoon. Unofficial numbers collected from private weather stations provided by SaltWire’s Weather Specialist, Allister Aalders, reported peak wind gusts of 60-80 km/h. Rainfall in the area ranged from five to 15 mm, with some localized areas getting as much as 30 mm.

NS Power workers could not go out to repair lines if winds were above 80km/h out of safety concerns.

As of Monday, over 300 NS Power workers were in Pictou County working to restore the power to the remaining customers.

Damage in New Glasgow

Apart from some downed trees, a blocked Temperance Street in New Glasgow on Saturday evening, and some branches and leaves strewn throughout the town, New Glasgow came out of Lee relatively unscathed.

New Glasgow’s Chief Administrative Office Lisa MacDonald said a lot of the mitigated damage can be attributed to lessons learned following post-tropical storm Fiona that ravaged the county last September, and a lot of planning leading up to the storm.

“We actually moved our town hall operations, which houses all of our IT and critical communication infrastructure. We moved those two generator operations on Saturday morning before the storm, and we did the same for our water treatment facilities so we wouldn’t experience any bumps or surges in power, which was very good, and we actually ran those right through till well after the event, just to ensure there were no disruptions,” she said.

The town added a forester on staff following Fiona. MacDonald explained they went out on Monday morning, Sept. 18, to inspect the trails and found minimum damage.

“We inspected all of our trail systems this morning. We had one tree down, and it wasn’t in one of our key locations, so there was no impact to trails opening despite very small debris that has to be collected,” she added.

MacDonald cautioned against comparing Fiona and Lee, saying that the two storms impacted the town differently.

She was happy to report that during the worst weather on Sept. 16, there weren’t any storm-related calls to the fire department or police services.

Impact on the County

Throughout Pictou County, John Davison, the regional coordinator for Emergency Management Operations (EMO), said many fire departments were busy responding to calls, particularly of trees knocking down lines on Saturday afternoon.

“There was one fire department they went to a call where a live wire was down across three driveways,” Davison said, adding, “As far as downed trees, there are a few down and wires as well. But it wasn’t the issue that we had with Fiona.”

He added that Mount Thom seemed to have gotten the worst of the wind, with reports of multiple trees being knocked over due to the strong gusts experienced.

Overall, he said the county was largely unscathed. There were no reports of washouts or significant infrastructural damage in the region. Even the calls that came into fire departments and police were sparse, he said, with some towns and municipalities getting multiple calls and others not receiving anything.

Ship Hector Celebrations

Lee came riding in on the coattails of the Ship Hector 250 celebrations. Despite the weather, the celebrations continued, although in an altered form.

Tours onto the replica Ship Hector were cancelled on Saturday, Sept. 16, at noon due to concerns with the weather. The Hector 250 Ceilidh was also cancelled that night due to the increasingly worsening weather as the evening progressed.

However, cancellations were made up when the Hector 250 Tattoo was restructured to be a concert on Sunday evening and moved indoors to the Pictou United Church.

Around the province

As Lee made landfall on Nova Scotia’s southwestern coast, it was categorized as a post-tropical storm with the winds of a weak Category 1 hurricane, as reported by SaltWire’s Allister Aalders.

Communities on the southwest coast were hit with max winds of 100 km/h, while parts of Halifax Regional Municipality had seen winds reach 120 km/h.

While communities assumed to be the hardest hit by Lee didn’t suffer nearly as much damage as expected, NS Power reported almost 277,000 outages across the province.

They had restored power to around 170,000 customers by Saturday morning.