Yarmouth comes through hurricane Kyle unscathed

By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

With the exception of downed branches, a few power outages that were quickly restored and some election signs that blew over, the Yarmouth area came through hurricane Kyle unscathed Sunday night.

Yarmouth Mayor Charles Crosby said there were no indications of any major, or even minor, damage and Harold Richardson, the coordinator of the Emergency Measures Organization said the same thing on Monday morning. “There was a tree that came down on Vancouver and brought some power lines down, but they were back in service in about an hour,” he said. “We didn’t get the east wind here. The wind was out of the west but we didn’t see a real storm surge, I’ve seen higher tides in our harbour.”

That’s not to say the joint EMO office didn’t have to contend with flooding, contaminated water sources, wide-spread power outages and evacuations due to a hurricane yesterday. But the hurricane it was dealing with was of the made-up variety as part of a hurricane training exercise that had been planned months ago. Theirs was a category two storm with a two-metre storm surge. (See our story in the Yarmouth section: Yarmouth EMO office conducts hurricane training exercise on same day Kyle churns toward region on NovaNewsNow.com.)

Given that this training was happening throughout the day, Richardson said they certainly would have been prepared to spring to action if the need had arisen. And he said the exercise was good training for the ‘next time.’ “It proved a lot of stuff to us and there was a lot of good questions asked (and answered),” he said. “I’m extremely pleased with what went on in our exercise Sunday.”

Kyle came ashore in southwestern Nova Scotia as a marginal category one hurricane. In this part of the province Shelburne County seems to have borne the brunt of the storm and damage.

By 11 p.m. Sunday night the storm had been downgraded to a tropical storm.

Nova Scotia Power was also busy overnight restoring power to parts of the province that had their electricity knocked out. By early Monday morning power had been restored to 40,000 customers. Any power outages that had occurred in Yarmouth County had been short-lived.