Despite the wind and rain that rocked the province, Dan The Man didn’t quite make it to Nova Scotia over the weekend.
Believe it or not, Environment Canada says that blast of weather didn’t quite come courtesy of post-tropical storm Danny, which at one point was forecast to track straight through Nova Scotia.
Guy Roussel of the Atlantic Storm Predication Centre in Dartmouth said Danny actually “dissipated before reaching the waters of Nova Scotia.”
“At the same time there was another low pressure system developing to the west,” he explained yesterday. “It absorbed the moisture and the energy from the dying or dissipating post-tropical storm Danny and it took over.”
Still, Roussel said wind gusts reached 90 killometres per hour in some parts of the province, including at Halifax Stanfield International Airport and along the Eastern Shore. Cape Breton even experienced winds of up to 119 km/h, he said.
Rainfall amounts varied across the Maritime region, but according to an Environment Canada weather summary, close to 80 millimetres of the wet stuff fell over the Halifax airport, while 87 millimetres landed on Yarmouth, and Sydney endured a whopping 104 millimetres.
Nova Scotia Power spokeswoman Jennifer Parker said about 17,000 customers were without power by the peak of the storm at about 6 a.m. yesterday, but that number had already dropped to about 5,000 by 8 a.m., with only 700 customers still waiting to have power restored by mid-afternoon. The largest outage in the Halifax area was in the city’s south end, she said.
Roussel said the “tropical air mass associated with Danny” still managed to move over Nova Scotia, bringing with it warmer temperatures.
Bill vs. Danny
Roussel called the wind and rain that pummeled the province “totally different” than hurricane Bill, which brushed by Nova Scotia as a Category 1 storm the weekend before.
Nevertheless, Environment Canada told Metro Bill brought between 50 and 60 millimetres of rain and winds of up to 87 km/h to the Halifax area, while the remnants of Danny dumped between 70 and 90 millimetres of rain over many parts of HRM, with wind gusts reaching 80 killometres per hour or more in some parts of the municipality.
