Lost Lake Tribune Labor Day 2010 Edition!
Father and son back home in Winnipeg
Bud Grant, a legend in Winnipeg and Minnesota, and Mike Grant, a legend at Eden Prairie, join forces up north.
WINNIPEG — A father and son together on the playing field is hardly a notable occurrence, even if it did take eight hours on a chartered bus and a trip through customs to make it happen.
But Bud and Mike Grant aren't your ordinary father-son duo. Each has a spot in Minnesota football coaching lore that has been taken to an international stage.
Mike Grant's Eden Prairie High School football team, winner of six Prep Bowl championships since 1996, is in Canada to open its season Friday with two games against schools from Manitoba.
The Eden Prairie team -- with enough players to field two full rosters for Friday's action -- arrived in Winnipeg on Thursday. It held an evening practice at Canada Inns Stadium, home of the Canadian Football League's Winnipeg Blue Bombers, more than five hours later than expected partly because of some tardiness for the 7 a.m. departure, partly because of a more-than-thorough Border Patrol and partly because of growling stomachs.
Patiently waiting when the buses finally arrived was Bud Grant, who around these parts is used to being the one folks wait for. True to his demeanor during his coaching career, Grant never fretted. He calmly took the pushed-back practice time in stride. "I'll still be there," he said.
One has to imagine he wouldn't miss this opportunity for anything. Though he spends most of his free time now hunting and fishing -- when he's not in the office he keeps at the Vikings' Winter Park complex in Eden Prairie -- Bud Grant remains an icon in Winnipeg. In 1953, he spent the first of four seasons there as a Blue Bombers player. He was named the head coach for the 1957 season.
'The foundation'
Born and raised 10 blocks from the Blue Bombers' home field, where Eden Prairie will play Friday, Jim Bell couldn't help but grow up a fan of the CFL franchise. "Man alive, I'd had to be not listening on a continual basis to not know the name Bud Grant," Bell said.
He's not alone. Revered as Grant is back home in Minnesota for his four Super Bowl runs in 18 seasons as the Vikings head coach, in Winnipeg they talk as though he's still one of them. Even though it has been 43 years since he last coached in Canada.
"Around here, there's respect with a capital 'R,' " said Bell, 51, a lifelong Winnipegger who is now the president and CEO of the Blue Bombers. "The tradition and the memories associated with the team's successes center around Bud Grant. You'll run out of ink. He's an institution”.
Grant took the Blue Bombers to six Grey Cup championship games in his 10 years of leading that team before taking the Vikings job in 1967.
Thursday's visit was one of countless treks north he's made over the decades. But this time he's not being inducted into another hall of fame or being named to a special anniversary team.
Grant, 83, is back to coach -- sort of. For Friday's games, the elder Grant was tabbed by his son to be Eden Prairie's "special assistant adviser on Canadian football" because they will be played under Canadian rules. The differences range from field dimensions to clock management. "I've asked for strategy," Mike Grant said, grinning. The hard-nosed gridiron vets will probably rekindle a memory or two as well.
Special memories
Mike Grant had not yet hit middle school when the family moved back to Minnesota. Even a 10-year-old can grasp the reality of a famous father, however.
"I remember after the games my mom handing us over the side of the stadium [railing] and my dad reaching up to take us into the locker room," Mike Grant said. "I remember the practices. Sitting in the radio booth. Watching the games in person and on TV. It's what our family revolved around. "To coach in the stadium where your dad had all that success, yeah, it's going to be special for us."
Just in time. The Blue Bombers are scheduled to move into a new, $120 million stadium in 2012. There are no firm plans for the present field. While that structure, wedged between a Home Depot and a Toys 'R' Us, might soon be gone, the memories of Grant's time in Manitoba's largest city will last.
Hint of nostalgia
Former Iowa standout Ken Ploen was lured to Winnipeg by Grant when the quarterback's eligibility for the Hawkeyes ran out in 1957. Ploen has remained in Winnipeg ever since.
"He's held in such high esteem," Ploen said of Grant. "And such a good coach to play for. He got you in shape, gave you an offense to run and then let you go run it."
Ploen is among a Blue Bombers alumni group that still considers Bud Grant a friend, something Mike Grant didn't fully appreciate until later in life.
"Some people may have doctors as dads, doing whatever they did in their world," Mike Grant said. "Our world was football. It didn't seem unique or special, because it was the way our family was and the way our dad was. It's the way the Grant family operated in Winnipeg and in Minnesota. Later, you realize how fortunate you were to have known those Bombers players and then with the Vikings."
Returning to Winnipeg as a legend is nothing new to Bud Grant. "I'm past that stage," he said. But when he gets on the sidelines Friday, the veteran coach admitted, there might be a hint of nostalgia. "This is something different," he said. "Mike remembers the field as a fan, watching the Bombers and the Bombers being a part of our family. It's innovative and everyone's going to benefit.
Information Gained from
http://www.startribune.com/sports/preps/102116299.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUo8cyaiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr
Fan jam downtown
The Vikings and the Twins played in Minneapolis at the same time for the first time ever. It was plenty crowded, but the night went smoothly.
As a rainbow traced its way across the Minneapolis skyline Thursday evening, a sea of purple and blue parted on the streets of downtown as Twins and Vikings fans went their separate ways to fields on each end of downtown.
About 100,000 rabid sports fans streamed into downtown in cars and squeezed into trains and buses. Until the Twins moved a mile northwest to Target Field this spring, the two teams had shared the Metrodome for nearly three decades, leaving no possibility that they could play at the same time.
But as the smell of grilled bratwurst and hot dogs wafted through downtown, the simultaneous games meant loyalties had to be divided for those who follow both teams.
"In a perfect world, I would stay four innings at Target Field and then take in the second half at the Vikings game," said Jon Frey of St. Paul. But in the real world, choices often need to be made, and Frey put on his Justin Morneau Twins jersey and boarded the Hiawatha light-rail line for Target Field. The decision wasn't all that difficult: The Twins game was free because his friend, Stephen Sevenich of Mendota Heights, had his father's season tickets.
Riding the same train, Mike Diggins from Montevideo acknowledged being an avid fan of both the Twins and the Vikings. But on a night when both are playing, purple wins out. "It's got to be the Vikings," he said, standing alongside his grandsons, 12-year-old Troy and 7-year-old Finn.
Purple and blue jerseys seemed to be standard uniform on the light-rail line into downtown, but a few brave Denver Broncos fans in team jerseys broke up the mix.
"We're from Iowa," said Gina Cole of Waterloo, her 5-year-old daughter, Kenzie, sitting on her lap. "Most of my family are Vikings fans. So we're used to it. I don't feel out of sorts because it's all in good fun."
Well, at least during the preseason. "If it were the playoffs, I might be a little nervous," she said. "I think I would be driving."
Other fans, however, wanted to prove that although they were headed into the Metrodome for football, a part of each heart was also at Target Field. Trevor Tjelmeland of Brooklyn Park walked briskly toward the Dome wearing a Twins jersey just because it was new and he hadn't worn it before. Besides, he said, "My old Cris Carter jersey is buried somewhere in a closet and I couldn't find it."
Mike Berg of Minneapolis, however, dressed with purpose, wearing his Vikings sweatshirt and hat with his Twins jacket to block out the chill of a late summer evening. The $150 Vikings game ticket that he got for free from a friend pulled him to the east end of downtown. "Without the ticket, I probably would have stayed home and rolled the TV [to watch both games]," he said. "But it's a nice evening to be downtown with 100,000 other people," he said.
But for scalpers and ticket brokers on street corners, business was slow. Jason Gabbert could hardly give away a Twins ticket. And he suspected brokers selling preseason game tickets for the Vikings were suffering as well. Business has been down since the Twins series two weeks ago against the White Sox, he said.
"Nobody knows why," he said. "Maybe it's because the college kids are back at school. Maybe it's the State Fair. "It just always gets weak in September."
Fears of traffic mayhem Thursday were very much overstated, Gabbert said.
Tou Lee of the Minneapolis Police Reserve was ready in traffic safety fluorescent to direct traffic. But he stood his ground on the sidewalk, watching sparse traffic flow smoothly. "We expected the worst," he said. "But it's flowing. So we're just standing here monitoring."
Hours after fans easily maneuvered into downtown, fears of postgame pileups evaporated when the Twins went into extra innings, winding up long after the Vikings finished.
Information Gained from http://www.startribune.com/local/102120799.html?elr=KArks:DCiUnP::DE8c7PiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr
Mudslides Kill at Least 38 in Guatemala
Torrential rains from a tropical depression caused mudslides that have killed at least 38 people in Guatemala -- most of them in separate disasters along the same highway.
In the village of Nahuala, rescue crews on Sunday searched through mud and rocks for bodies after two landslides in the same spot killed at least 20 people along a highway leading northwest of the capital toward Mexico.
A slide Saturday afternoon had trapped vehicles at kilometer 171 of the Inter-American highway, and some of the people who came to rescue them were themselves caught by a second slide, officials reported.
"Under the earth there is a bus that carried we don't know how many people, and there are those who tried to help the victims of the first slide," regional fire department Maj. Otto Mazariegos said.
Rescue workers have recovered 20 bodies from that site, said fire department spokesman Jose Rodriguez. He said at least 60 people are missing.
A few hours earlier, a landslide on kilometer marker 81 of the same highway partially buried a bus, killing 12 people.
That led President Alvaro Colom to declare a national emergency. He said four children and two adults were buried in other slides elsewhere.
"It is a tragic day. Today alone 18 people have died, 12 buried by a hill when the traveled in a bus," Colom told a news conference.
The president told officials to close the highway for fear of more slides.
"There are several hillsides that are loose and could fall. So we ask the population to not go out, to avoid moving along the highways," he said -- not long before new slides took more lives.
Heavy rains from Tropical Depression 11-E have pelted Guatemala for days, unleashing deadly mudslides in several areas, cutting highways and forcing officials to evacuate thousands of people.
Information Gained from
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/09/05/mudslides-kill-guatemala/
Hurricane Earl hammers Nova Scotia
September 3, 2010: Hurricane Earl battered Nova Scotia as winds of up to 135 km/h cut off power to more than 220,000 customers from the South Shore to Cape Breton Island.
Earl first made landfall at 10:30 a.m. about 85 kilometres southwest of Lunenburg as a Category 1 hurricane. It had been downgraded to a tropical storm, with sustained winds in the 110 km/h range, by 1 p.m., officials from Environment Canada said Saturday. Two hours later, the centre of the storm passed through the province and veered off towards Prince Edward Island.
One man has died as a result of the storm. Johnny Mitchell Jr., 54, is believed to have drowned in Blind Bay, Halifax County, after he went out to try to secure a boat that had drifted from its mooring.
RCMP Const. Tamu Bracken said the Bayside man and another man decided to swim out to the boat that had gone adrift. Once they got to the boat, they boarded it, started up the engine and moved it away from the rocks, she said.
"They waited awhile," Const. Bracken said, but then the victim put on a life-jacket, jumped from the boat and made for shore. The other man stayed on the boat. Shortly, the victim "started calling for help," said the constable.
A relative onshore heard the call and jumped into the water to try to save the man, managing to bring him to shore, said Bracken. Emergency crews were called to the scene around 2:30 p.m., but were unable to revive Mitchell.
"I am deeply saddened by this tragedy, which further underscores the severity of hurricanes and major weather events," said Ramona Jennex, minister of the Emergency Management Office, in a media release Saturday night. Earlier in the day, the minister had urged everyone to make safety a priority. "The heavy wind and rain will continue to make driving difficult and dangerous," she said during a media teleconference.
Top winds speeds of about 135 km/h blew off of Beaver Island, about 100 kilometres east of Halifax. Rainfall of about 40 millimetres pummelled the Annapolis Valley, Colchester County and the Halifax airport, while the South Shore only got about 25 millimetres.
"So the winds were pretty strong with this storm," Bill Appleby of the Canadian Hurricane Centre said in an interview once Earl had passed through. "Some of the steady winds (with Juan) were a little higher than what we’ve seen here. So we didn’t get as much wind out of this, but this was also a significant wave event."
An offshore buoy registered that the average waves off Halifax were crashing in at about 13 metres, but Appleby said the most intense waves would have peaked at more than 25 metres. The storm surge in Halifax harbour shot up to 1.2 metres at low tide. "So some of those values are getting comparable to what we saw during Juan," Appleby said.
People living on Big Tancook Island on the South Shore braced for the passing of Earl’s eye just before noon. "We’re having bouts of heavy rain off and on and constant winds but not exceptionally high," said island resident Linda MacKenzie, who lives on the island’s north side. "It’s not too, too bad. I’ve seen far worse." Before the eye passed, winds were clocked at 101 km/h. "I’m starting to get different reports of damage on the island. (I’ve heard about) barn doors being blown off, large sheets of plywood being blown off the sides of buildings," MacKenzie said.
Retired fisherman Clifford D’Entremont said everyone took this storm seriously. "We’re used to the sea around here."
The Region of Queens opened an emergency operations centre on White Point Road at 10 a.m. Saturday when it was clear Earl would sweep easterly across the South Shore.
Three roads in the South Shore region were shut down by mid-afternoon — two in Lunenburg County and one in Queens. The Eastern Shore Road between Port Medway and West Berlin in Queens County and Highway 331, between Rissers Beach and Petite Riviere, as well as Green Bay Road, both in Lunenburg County, were closed due to fallen trees and downed power lines. The Fugate family used to just a block of Nova Scotia 331 in a town south of Bridgewater and north of Rissers Beach.
The emergency air ambulance out of Halifax was cancelled for the area as was the ferry from Chester to the Tancook islands.
People living along the coast of western Cape Breton, who often endure legendary southeast winds known Les Suetes, were not impressed with the force of what had turned into a tropical storm.
"Oh, we’ve had some rain and some wind, maybe up to about 60 kilometres an hour, but there’s not much here," said Jeanette Cameron, when contacted by telephone Saturday. "We’ve had much, much worse than this, that’s for sure." When Les Suetes howl, locals know it’s best to head for cover. The winds can reach over 150 km/h without any effort. "We’re used to high winds in the wintertime, especially, so this is OK," she said.
Meanwhile, in Meat Cove, where recent flooding caused severe damage to roads and bridges leading into this remote Cape Breton community, residents said the rain paled in comparison to the previous downpour. "We got some rain and we got some wind but we got through it just fine," said one man.
In Halifax, winds toppled trees, throwing leaves and limbs through the air and into power lines. Furniture that wasn’t chained down or stored away was also being blown along local streets. More than 400 Nova Scotia Power employees fought the high wind and heavy rainfall to try to restore electricity to more than 220,000 customers.
Information Gained from http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1200187.html
Bud Grant, a legend in Winnipeg and Minnesota, and Mike Grant, a legend at Eden Prairie, join forces up north.
WINNIPEG — A father and son together on the playing field is hardly a notable occurrence, even if it did take eight hours on a chartered bus and a trip through customs to make it happen.
But Bud and Mike Grant aren't your ordinary father-son duo. Each has a spot in Minnesota football coaching lore that has been taken to an international stage.
Mike Grant's Eden Prairie High School football team, winner of six Prep Bowl championships since 1996, is in Canada to open its season Friday with two games against schools from Manitoba.
The Eden Prairie team -- with enough players to field two full rosters for Friday's action -- arrived in Winnipeg on Thursday. It held an evening practice at Canada Inns Stadium, home of the Canadian Football League's Winnipeg Blue Bombers, more than five hours later than expected partly because of some tardiness for the 7 a.m. departure, partly because of a more-than-thorough Border Patrol and partly because of growling stomachs.
Patiently waiting when the buses finally arrived was Bud Grant, who around these parts is used to being the one folks wait for. True to his demeanor during his coaching career, Grant never fretted. He calmly took the pushed-back practice time in stride. "I'll still be there," he said.
One has to imagine he wouldn't miss this opportunity for anything. Though he spends most of his free time now hunting and fishing -- when he's not in the office he keeps at the Vikings' Winter Park complex in Eden Prairie -- Bud Grant remains an icon in Winnipeg. In 1953, he spent the first of four seasons there as a Blue Bombers player. He was named the head coach for the 1957 season.
'The foundation'
Born and raised 10 blocks from the Blue Bombers' home field, where Eden Prairie will play Friday, Jim Bell couldn't help but grow up a fan of the CFL franchise. "Man alive, I'd had to be not listening on a continual basis to not know the name Bud Grant," Bell said.
He's not alone. Revered as Grant is back home in Minnesota for his four Super Bowl runs in 18 seasons as the Vikings head coach, in Winnipeg they talk as though he's still one of them. Even though it has been 43 years since he last coached in Canada.
"Around here, there's respect with a capital 'R,' " said Bell, 51, a lifelong Winnipegger who is now the president and CEO of the Blue Bombers. "The tradition and the memories associated with the team's successes center around Bud Grant. You'll run out of ink. He's an institution”.
Grant took the Blue Bombers to six Grey Cup championship games in his 10 years of leading that team before taking the Vikings job in 1967.
Thursday's visit was one of countless treks north he's made over the decades. But this time he's not being inducted into another hall of fame or being named to a special anniversary team.
Grant, 83, is back to coach -- sort of. For Friday's games, the elder Grant was tabbed by his son to be Eden Prairie's "special assistant adviser on Canadian football" because they will be played under Canadian rules. The differences range from field dimensions to clock management. "I've asked for strategy," Mike Grant said, grinning. The hard-nosed gridiron vets will probably rekindle a memory or two as well.
Special memories
Mike Grant had not yet hit middle school when the family moved back to Minnesota. Even a 10-year-old can grasp the reality of a famous father, however.
"I remember after the games my mom handing us over the side of the stadium [railing] and my dad reaching up to take us into the locker room," Mike Grant said. "I remember the practices. Sitting in the radio booth. Watching the games in person and on TV. It's what our family revolved around. "To coach in the stadium where your dad had all that success, yeah, it's going to be special for us."
Just in time. The Blue Bombers are scheduled to move into a new, $120 million stadium in 2012. There are no firm plans for the present field. While that structure, wedged between a Home Depot and a Toys 'R' Us, might soon be gone, the memories of Grant's time in Manitoba's largest city will last.
Hint of nostalgia
Former Iowa standout Ken Ploen was lured to Winnipeg by Grant when the quarterback's eligibility for the Hawkeyes ran out in 1957. Ploen has remained in Winnipeg ever since.
"He's held in such high esteem," Ploen said of Grant. "And such a good coach to play for. He got you in shape, gave you an offense to run and then let you go run it."
Ploen is among a Blue Bombers alumni group that still considers Bud Grant a friend, something Mike Grant didn't fully appreciate until later in life.
"Some people may have doctors as dads, doing whatever they did in their world," Mike Grant said. "Our world was football. It didn't seem unique or special, because it was the way our family was and the way our dad was. It's the way the Grant family operated in Winnipeg and in Minnesota. Later, you realize how fortunate you were to have known those Bombers players and then with the Vikings."
Returning to Winnipeg as a legend is nothing new to Bud Grant. "I'm past that stage," he said. But when he gets on the sidelines Friday, the veteran coach admitted, there might be a hint of nostalgia. "This is something different," he said. "Mike remembers the field as a fan, watching the Bombers and the Bombers being a part of our family. It's innovative and everyone's going to benefit.
Information Gained from
http://www.startribune.com/sports/preps/102116299.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUo8cyaiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr
Fan jam downtown
The Vikings and the Twins played in Minneapolis at the same time for the first time ever. It was plenty crowded, but the night went smoothly.
As a rainbow traced its way across the Minneapolis skyline Thursday evening, a sea of purple and blue parted on the streets of downtown as Twins and Vikings fans went their separate ways to fields on each end of downtown.
About 100,000 rabid sports fans streamed into downtown in cars and squeezed into trains and buses. Until the Twins moved a mile northwest to Target Field this spring, the two teams had shared the Metrodome for nearly three decades, leaving no possibility that they could play at the same time.
But as the smell of grilled bratwurst and hot dogs wafted through downtown, the simultaneous games meant loyalties had to be divided for those who follow both teams.
"In a perfect world, I would stay four innings at Target Field and then take in the second half at the Vikings game," said Jon Frey of St. Paul. But in the real world, choices often need to be made, and Frey put on his Justin Morneau Twins jersey and boarded the Hiawatha light-rail line for Target Field. The decision wasn't all that difficult: The Twins game was free because his friend, Stephen Sevenich of Mendota Heights, had his father's season tickets.
Riding the same train, Mike Diggins from Montevideo acknowledged being an avid fan of both the Twins and the Vikings. But on a night when both are playing, purple wins out. "It's got to be the Vikings," he said, standing alongside his grandsons, 12-year-old Troy and 7-year-old Finn.
Purple and blue jerseys seemed to be standard uniform on the light-rail line into downtown, but a few brave Denver Broncos fans in team jerseys broke up the mix.
"We're from Iowa," said Gina Cole of Waterloo, her 5-year-old daughter, Kenzie, sitting on her lap. "Most of my family are Vikings fans. So we're used to it. I don't feel out of sorts because it's all in good fun."
Well, at least during the preseason. "If it were the playoffs, I might be a little nervous," she said. "I think I would be driving."
Other fans, however, wanted to prove that although they were headed into the Metrodome for football, a part of each heart was also at Target Field. Trevor Tjelmeland of Brooklyn Park walked briskly toward the Dome wearing a Twins jersey just because it was new and he hadn't worn it before. Besides, he said, "My old Cris Carter jersey is buried somewhere in a closet and I couldn't find it."
Mike Berg of Minneapolis, however, dressed with purpose, wearing his Vikings sweatshirt and hat with his Twins jacket to block out the chill of a late summer evening. The $150 Vikings game ticket that he got for free from a friend pulled him to the east end of downtown. "Without the ticket, I probably would have stayed home and rolled the TV [to watch both games]," he said. "But it's a nice evening to be downtown with 100,000 other people," he said.
But for scalpers and ticket brokers on street corners, business was slow. Jason Gabbert could hardly give away a Twins ticket. And he suspected brokers selling preseason game tickets for the Vikings were suffering as well. Business has been down since the Twins series two weeks ago against the White Sox, he said.
"Nobody knows why," he said. "Maybe it's because the college kids are back at school. Maybe it's the State Fair. "It just always gets weak in September."
Fears of traffic mayhem Thursday were very much overstated, Gabbert said.
Tou Lee of the Minneapolis Police Reserve was ready in traffic safety fluorescent to direct traffic. But he stood his ground on the sidewalk, watching sparse traffic flow smoothly. "We expected the worst," he said. "But it's flowing. So we're just standing here monitoring."
Hours after fans easily maneuvered into downtown, fears of postgame pileups evaporated when the Twins went into extra innings, winding up long after the Vikings finished.
Information Gained from http://www.startribune.com/local/102120799.html?elr=KArks:DCiUnP::DE8c7PiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr
Mudslides Kill at Least 38 in Guatemala
Torrential rains from a tropical depression caused mudslides that have killed at least 38 people in Guatemala -- most of them in separate disasters along the same highway.
In the village of Nahuala, rescue crews on Sunday searched through mud and rocks for bodies after two landslides in the same spot killed at least 20 people along a highway leading northwest of the capital toward Mexico.
A slide Saturday afternoon had trapped vehicles at kilometer 171 of the Inter-American highway, and some of the people who came to rescue them were themselves caught by a second slide, officials reported.
"Under the earth there is a bus that carried we don't know how many people, and there are those who tried to help the victims of the first slide," regional fire department Maj. Otto Mazariegos said.
Rescue workers have recovered 20 bodies from that site, said fire department spokesman Jose Rodriguez. He said at least 60 people are missing.
A few hours earlier, a landslide on kilometer marker 81 of the same highway partially buried a bus, killing 12 people.
That led President Alvaro Colom to declare a national emergency. He said four children and two adults were buried in other slides elsewhere.
"It is a tragic day. Today alone 18 people have died, 12 buried by a hill when the traveled in a bus," Colom told a news conference.
The president told officials to close the highway for fear of more slides.
"There are several hillsides that are loose and could fall. So we ask the population to not go out, to avoid moving along the highways," he said -- not long before new slides took more lives.
Heavy rains from Tropical Depression 11-E have pelted Guatemala for days, unleashing deadly mudslides in several areas, cutting highways and forcing officials to evacuate thousands of people.
Information Gained from
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/09/05/mudslides-kill-guatemala/
Hurricane Earl hammers Nova Scotia
September 3, 2010: Hurricane Earl battered Nova Scotia as winds of up to 135 km/h cut off power to more than 220,000 customers from the South Shore to Cape Breton Island.
Earl first made landfall at 10:30 a.m. about 85 kilometres southwest of Lunenburg as a Category 1 hurricane. It had been downgraded to a tropical storm, with sustained winds in the 110 km/h range, by 1 p.m., officials from Environment Canada said Saturday. Two hours later, the centre of the storm passed through the province and veered off towards Prince Edward Island.
One man has died as a result of the storm. Johnny Mitchell Jr., 54, is believed to have drowned in Blind Bay, Halifax County, after he went out to try to secure a boat that had drifted from its mooring.
RCMP Const. Tamu Bracken said the Bayside man and another man decided to swim out to the boat that had gone adrift. Once they got to the boat, they boarded it, started up the engine and moved it away from the rocks, she said.
"They waited awhile," Const. Bracken said, but then the victim put on a life-jacket, jumped from the boat and made for shore. The other man stayed on the boat. Shortly, the victim "started calling for help," said the constable.
A relative onshore heard the call and jumped into the water to try to save the man, managing to bring him to shore, said Bracken. Emergency crews were called to the scene around 2:30 p.m., but were unable to revive Mitchell.
"I am deeply saddened by this tragedy, which further underscores the severity of hurricanes and major weather events," said Ramona Jennex, minister of the Emergency Management Office, in a media release Saturday night. Earlier in the day, the minister had urged everyone to make safety a priority. "The heavy wind and rain will continue to make driving difficult and dangerous," she said during a media teleconference.
Top winds speeds of about 135 km/h blew off of Beaver Island, about 100 kilometres east of Halifax. Rainfall of about 40 millimetres pummelled the Annapolis Valley, Colchester County and the Halifax airport, while the South Shore only got about 25 millimetres.
"So the winds were pretty strong with this storm," Bill Appleby of the Canadian Hurricane Centre said in an interview once Earl had passed through. "Some of the steady winds (with Juan) were a little higher than what we’ve seen here. So we didn’t get as much wind out of this, but this was also a significant wave event."
An offshore buoy registered that the average waves off Halifax were crashing in at about 13 metres, but Appleby said the most intense waves would have peaked at more than 25 metres. The storm surge in Halifax harbour shot up to 1.2 metres at low tide. "So some of those values are getting comparable to what we saw during Juan," Appleby said.
People living on Big Tancook Island on the South Shore braced for the passing of Earl’s eye just before noon. "We’re having bouts of heavy rain off and on and constant winds but not exceptionally high," said island resident Linda MacKenzie, who lives on the island’s north side. "It’s not too, too bad. I’ve seen far worse." Before the eye passed, winds were clocked at 101 km/h. "I’m starting to get different reports of damage on the island. (I’ve heard about) barn doors being blown off, large sheets of plywood being blown off the sides of buildings," MacKenzie said.
Retired fisherman Clifford D’Entremont said everyone took this storm seriously. "We’re used to the sea around here."
The Region of Queens opened an emergency operations centre on White Point Road at 10 a.m. Saturday when it was clear Earl would sweep easterly across the South Shore.
Three roads in the South Shore region were shut down by mid-afternoon — two in Lunenburg County and one in Queens. The Eastern Shore Road between Port Medway and West Berlin in Queens County and Highway 331, between Rissers Beach and Petite Riviere, as well as Green Bay Road, both in Lunenburg County, were closed due to fallen trees and downed power lines. The Fugate family used to just a block of Nova Scotia 331 in a town south of Bridgewater and north of Rissers Beach.
The emergency air ambulance out of Halifax was cancelled for the area as was the ferry from Chester to the Tancook islands.
People living along the coast of western Cape Breton, who often endure legendary southeast winds known Les Suetes, were not impressed with the force of what had turned into a tropical storm.
"Oh, we’ve had some rain and some wind, maybe up to about 60 kilometres an hour, but there’s not much here," said Jeanette Cameron, when contacted by telephone Saturday. "We’ve had much, much worse than this, that’s for sure." When Les Suetes howl, locals know it’s best to head for cover. The winds can reach over 150 km/h without any effort. "We’re used to high winds in the wintertime, especially, so this is OK," she said.
Meanwhile, in Meat Cove, where recent flooding caused severe damage to roads and bridges leading into this remote Cape Breton community, residents said the rain paled in comparison to the previous downpour. "We got some rain and we got some wind but we got through it just fine," said one man.
In Halifax, winds toppled trees, throwing leaves and limbs through the air and into power lines. Furniture that wasn’t chained down or stored away was also being blown along local streets. More than 400 Nova Scotia Power employees fought the high wind and heavy rainfall to try to restore electricity to more than 220,000 customers.
Information Gained from http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1200187.html
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