Subtropical Storm Melissa causes Maritime power outages

Subtropical storm causes Maritime power outages A wet and windy start to the long weekend for parts of the Maritimes as Subtropical Storm Melissa passed by the Atlantic.

A wet and windy start to the long weekend for parts of the Maritimes as Subtropical Storm Melissa passed by the Atlantic coast Friday night into Saturday morning.

“It had a lot of convection around the centre of the storm, basically thunderstorms and that is most often seen with tropical storms, tropical depressions,” explained CTV Atlantic Chief Meteorologist Kalin Mitchell. “At the same time, its wind field was quite spread out from the centre of the storm.”

Over 3000 Nova Scotia Power customers lost power, mainly in downtown Halifax, on a power system that is still recovering from Dorian. The Halifax Central Library was closed after the power went out.

A cruise ship was also diverted away from Halifax into Sydney because of the high winds.

“We did see some very strong Easterly wind gusts, both Friday night and early Saturday morning, especially against the Southwestern Atlantic coastline of Nova Scotia, and some of those gusts were in the range of 80-90 kilometers per hour,” adds Mitchell.

But on this Thanksgiving weekend, many Maritimers were thankful the storm wasn’t a whole lot worse.

“It is what it is! It’s Nova Scotia and it will change,” said Halifax resident Gil Dubois. “As any Nova Scotian will tell you, wait five minutes and it will change,”

“It’s just nice to be with family, it doesn’t matter about the weather,” says another Halifax resident.

And for many visitors things could be worse, with significant snow already on the ground in Western Canada.

“At home we have storm warnings out for snow. They’ve closed the highways. We flew into Winnipeg and we drive from Winnipeg to Moosomin which is about four hours and the highway was closed,” said Brenda Higgins, who was visiting from Saskatchewan.

The rest of the weekend is expected to see calmer weather, and may even see some sunshine for the Holiday Monday, giving Maritimers yet another reason to be thankful.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Emily Baron Cadloff.