Sandy rainfall challenges 40-year-old record
Posted Nov 1, 2012 05:40:52 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A thunder and lightning storm that rolled over the region Halloween day, as part of post-tropical storm Sandy, brought enough rain to challenge the Oct. 31 rainfall record for the Halifax region.
“It looks like we probably tied the record,” said News 95.7 meteorologist Richard Zurawski Thursday. “My guess is, we probably broke the record very slightly.”
Zurawski says 51.6 millimeters of rain fell in the municipality Wednesday.
Historical rainfall data is currently unavailable as it is being assessed, but Zurawski said the previous amount was close to 51.2 millimeters, set in the 1970s.
The storm also caused a power bump at the IWK Children and Women’s hospital, when the hospital’s generator failed to come online.
“That did shut down some of our floors, mostly in our Children’s Centre and the Global and Research Pavilion,” IWK spokesperson Steve Ashton told Global News.
The outage forced the cancellation of elective surgeries and procedures, which were set to resume Thursday.
The IWK’s Nick Cox told News 95.7, all five of the IWK’s generators are tested weekly during a simulated power outage. It’s still unknown why they didn’t work yesterday.
“We’re not sure yet,” said Ashton. “It seems that in some areas it took longer for the systems to kick in. So, that’s what they’re investigating right now.”
Firefighters in HRM also responded to a house fire in Fall River on Wednesday believed to have been caused by a storm-related lightning strike.
As of Thursday morning, post-tropical storm Sandy had killed at least 74 people in the U.S., forced thousands from their homes, and knocked out power to more than half a million people in the mid-Atlantic region.
There was also a second Canadian death when a hydro worker was electrocuted while repairing a damaged power line in Sarnia, Ont.
