Ted Keeping is glad he went back home to Port aux Basques a month ago for a family visit and wasn’t there this past weekend when Fiona reared her ugly head.
The 67-year-old Prince George resident spent the first 22 years of his life in the southwestern Newfoundland town which took a direct hit from the hurricane early Saturday morning. Like the rest of the world, Keeping is having a hard time fathoming how destructive the storm was.
Blasted by wind gusts of that hit 173 kilometres per hour and a storm surge made worse by an unusually high tide that brought waves 15 metres high, houses along Water Street East overlooking the ocean were ripped from their foundations and fell into the sea. The high water smashed bait shops and sheds and tossed boats onto the shore, moving them hundreds of metres into a park, leaving in its wake piles of rocks and debris on what used to be streets.
“Of everybody I know and have talked to, nobody’s ever seen a storm like this one,” said Keeping.
“It’s in a cove, and that’s what did most of the damage was the water surge. It’s a disaster. The local boats, most of them got them out, but a lot didn’t and there’s nothing left of them, or they’re down the road somewhere.”
“My sister that lives there, she’s fine, she’s quite a ways from the water, but they were pretty scared about the windows blowing in,” he said. “The worst thing that they were fearing was their picture window coming in. Those houses on the shore that did survive, the windows were blown out of most of them. A buddy of mine that lived for 40 years on that water and this one took him right out. There’s three or four feet of water in their house and it took out all the windows. It blew the basement right out of it, and half the house stayed there.”
Port aux Basques is built on mostly rock. Because of the high winds that regularly buffet the town there are few trees, and the trees that do survive rarely exceed 12 or 14 feet. That helped the coastal towns in Newfoundland escape the widespread power-line damage caused by Fiona in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, where large trees were uprooted and fell on structures or utility lines.
Keeping saw on social media the before and after photos that reveal what used to be a cove surrounded by lush green vegetation suddenly turned into moonscape at Fox Roost, a town that faces the Cabot Strait, 14 km east of Port aux Basques.
“It was devastating,” said Keeping.
He says it’s going take time and lot of money to rebuild the town, which faces staggering costs to repair roads and hydro lines, replace water and sewer systems and restore public access to the beach trails he loves to walk in his annual trips back to Newfoundland. When he was there last month while walking along the beach with a friend Keeping noticed a wooden platform resting on marshland.
“It was sitting all by itself and asked if there was a trail going to it and my buddy said, ‘No, that was the last storm in April that took it from the beach and brought it inland and it stayed there,” said Keeping. “The boardwalk I used to walk in the beach area is gone.”
In January 2020, the so-called Snowmageddon, brought winds of 134 km/hr and 90 centimetres of snow that buried St. John’s, Nfld. After seeing hurricane-like conditions twice in this year, Keeping is convinced climate change is to blame for the damaging storms that have hit the east coast in recent years.
“I honestly think it’s climate change, there’s too much water and that’s what happens when it gets blown around, it starts filling up the land,” he said.
A 73-year-old woman died Saturday in Port aux Basques after her house was hit by a huge wave just as she went to the basement to check out the effects of an earlier wave that rocked the house. Keeping knows the woman she was with at the time but still doesn’t know the identity of the dead woman. Chances are he will recognize the name. In Port aux Basques, a town of about 4,000, practically everybody knows everybody who lives there.
For people whose homes were destroyed or left unsafe, the town’s Facebook site have been flooded with offers from residents offering places for them to stay.
Ted’s cousin, Kevin Keeping, 68, moved from Port aux Basques to Prince George when he was 20 but the town is still home to six of his siblings. They all live on higher ground and their homes were unscathed. Port aux Basques residents are used to the wind and many have generators to prepare for times like these when the power goes out. They’re using them to charge cell phones, the means of communication for most people with land lines still knocked out.
“They got lucky, everybody was OK, they were just expecting a regular storm like they always get but I guess nobody thought it was going to be as bad as it was,” said Kevin Keeping.
“They all got whacked pretty hard. They had no power, but they had everything else. Nobody got hurt. When I talked to my sister they still didn’t know quite yet how many houses got swept out to sea. They have one video that shows a house that just blew apart. My niece’s neighbours’ house across the street was on the waterfront and when they got back the next morning their neighbours’ house and two sheds were sitting on the road.”
He last visited Newfoundland last summer and misses his family and friends there but not the extremes Mother Nature sometimes tosses its way.
“That’s the worst storm in history,” he said. “The only reason I left Newfoundland was because of the weather.”
