Irene loses punch before hitting Maritimes
Posted Aug 29, 2011 05:51:01 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It was the storm that could have been.
Other than some power outages, cancellations at the airport, and scattered leaves, Irene didn’t leave too much of a mark in Nova Scotia.
The post tropical storm lost a lot of punch before reaching our region, and missed many parts of the Maritimes all together.
We knew Hurricane Irene wasn’t going to make a direct hit in Atlantic Canada, but the storm was still expected to be worse than it was.
“It really wasn’t as big a storm as we thought it might have been,” says News 95.7 Meterologist Richard Zurawski. “That really started after Cape Hatteras it degenerated quite quickly to a Category-1 storm and didn’t regain strength and then by the time it was in New England, it was just a tropical storm and now it’s just a post tropical depression.”
Zurawski says we did get some strong winds overnight, reaching about 85 kph in Halifax. The strongest gusts in Nova Scotia were recorded in Greenwood at 93 kph.
A wind warning is still in effect for the region.
But in terms of precipitation, Zurawski says we got much less than expected. He says the total rainfall amount for Nova Scotia was under 30 millimeters.
“Not really the washout that we thought we might have been able to have to account for with Hurricane Irene,” he says.
Power has been restored to just about all areas of the HRM but there are still several cancellations into and out of the Halifax Stanfield International Airport.
