CNN –
Hurricane Fiona’s strength is barreling up Canada’s east coast after making landfall in Nova Scotia early Saturday, lashing the area with ferocious rain and winds and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of people in what could be a “faulty” weather event for the country.
Fiona, now a post-tropical cyclone, had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (the strength of a Category 1 hurricane) by 8 a.m. ET Saturday, with its center over the Gulf of St. Lawrence after crossing Nova Scotia , the US national hurricane. said the center.
The storm knocked out power in most of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island Saturday morning, with winds and rain spreading far from the center of the storm. More than 540,000 outages were reported in Atlantic Canada, including nearly all 86,000 customers in Prince Edward Island, according to utility tracker Poweroutage.com.
The storm made landfall in the dark early Saturday as a powerful post-tropical cyclone in eastern Nova Scotia, between Canso and Guysborough, and crossed the province’s Cape Breton Island. Officials in the Cape Breton area declared an emergency and asked people to shelter in place.
“Across the province, we are hearing reports of downed trees and power lines as the storm continues to move through,” the Nova Scotia Office of Emergency Management tweeted.
West of landfall in the Nova Scotia capital of Halifax, the roof of an apartment complex collapsed, forcing about 100 people to flee to a shelter, Mayor Mike told CNN on Saturday Savage.
“A lot of trees up — power outages everywhere. Our bridges, our traffic connections are closed,” Savage said.
In Prince Edward Island’s capital, Charlottetown, police tweeted photos of damage, including the collapsed roof of a home.
“Conditions are like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Charlottetown police tweeted early Saturday.
After passing through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Fiona should reach the lower north coast of Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador late Saturday, the Canadian Hurricane Center said.
Hurricane-force gusts have been reported in parts of Maritime Canada, generally between 70 and 95 mph (110 to over 150 km/h). A mid-morning peak gust was 111 mph (179 km/h) in Arisaig, Nova Scotia, according to Environment Canada.
Officials on Canada’s Atlantic coast had urged those in Fiona’s path to be on high alert for the storm, which has already killed at least five people and knocked out power to millions people as it hit several Caribbean and Atlantic islands this week.
Fiona “could be a historic event for Canada in terms of tropical cyclone intensity,” and could even become Canada’s version of Superstorm Sandy, said Chris Fogarty, manager of the Canadian Centre. of hurricanes Sandy in 2012 affected 24 states and the entire eastern seaboard, causing an estimated $78.7 billion in damage.
It could also dump two months of rain on the area, forecasters in Canada said Friday.
An unofficial barometric pressure of 931.6 mb was recorded at Hart Island, which would make Fiona the lowest pressure landfall storm on record in Canada, according to the Canadian Hurricane Centre.
Fiona had been a Category 4 storm early Wednesday in the Atlantic after passing the Turks and Caicos and remained so until Friday afternoon, when it weakened as it approached Canada.
It became post-tropical before landfall, meaning that instead of a warm core, the storm now had a cold core. This does not affect the storm’s ability to produce strong winds, rain and storm surge; it just means that the inner mechanics of the storm have changed.
Fiona approached Canada at the same time as a trough of low pressure and cold air to the north, as Sandy did, according to Bob Robichaud of the Canadian Hurricane Centre.
“Sandy was bigger than Fiona is expected to be. But the process is essentially the same, where you have two features feeding off each other to create a strong storm as we’ll see,” he said on Friday.
As of 8 a.m. Saturday, hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from Fiona’s center, while tropical-storm-force winds reached up to 405 miles, according to the National Center for Hurricanes of the United States.