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Hurricane Dorian hits Canada’s city of Halifax

Hurricane Dorian hits Canada’s city of Halifax
September 8, 2019
WASHINGTON (Web Desk) – After raking the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Friday, Hurricane hit Halifax, the city of Canada on Sunday. According to the foreign media, Hundreds of thousands of people are without power in Nova Scotia as Dorian made landfall. Dorian arrived on Canada’s Atlantic coast Saturday with heavy rain and powerful winds, toppling a construction crane in Halifax and knocking out power for more than 300,000 people a day after the storm wreaked havoc on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Many communities within the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) are currently affected by the outages, with Nova Scotia Power attributing the cause to high winds, rain and damaged power lines. Residents of Nova Scotia braced for heavy rainfall and potential flooding along the coast, as officials in Halifax urged people to secure heavy objects that might become projectiles. Businesses were encouraged to close early. Around 400,000 Nova Scotia Power customers were off the grid as of Saturday night, and in New Brunswick, more than 64,000 households and businesses lost power, most in the southern reaches of the province. Peter Andrews, deputy chief of operations for Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency, said at a news conference Saturday evening that there have been no reports of significant injuries or deaths so far. The winds have caused damage, though — including uprooting trees, blowing off part of a roof and causing a construction crane to collapse. A day earlier, Hurricane Dorian briefly made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Friday, striking the beach-fringed barrier islands with powerful winds and battering waves days after reducing parts of the Bahamas to rubble. The storm made landfall at Cape Hatteras at about 9am (1300 GMT) with maximum sustained winds of 90 miles per hour (150 km per hour), according to the National Hurricane Center. That was far weaker than its slow, deadly tour through the Bahamas earlier in the week that caused at least 30 deaths and likely many more. Before the morning was over, Dorian was headed back out to open sea, and some residents and officials expressed relief at relatively minimal damage. The winds swept floodwaters into coastal areas, hitting the Outer Banks’ Ocracoke Island particularly hard with a 7-foot (2-meter) storm surge, though there were no serious injuries reported, said Donnie Shumate, a spokesman for Hyde County. County officials were offering to fly residents by helicopter to a shelter on the mainland, but only one resident had expressed interest so far, Shumate said. “Not everyone’s as panicked as they were,” he said.