Earl lost its tropical storm status over Canada late on Saturday, US government forecasters announced, but the storm still left one person dead and nearly 1 million people without power in northeastern Canada. The storm also menaced the east coast of the US, but left it largely undamaged.
“Earl is now post-tropical, and weakening is expected during the next 48 hours,” the US National Hurricane Center said.
Early yesterday, the center of the storm was located 295km southwest of Mary’s Harbour, in the Canadian region of Labrador, the hurricane center said.
It was packing sustained winds of 100kph and moving north-northeast at 74kph. The center of the storm made landfall in southern Nova Scotia shortly after 11am on Saturday, but the Canadian Hurricane Centre later said its strength steadily fell as it buffeted the craggy coastline.
Although weakened, Earl still pounded Halifax, the region’s largest city, with high winds and rain.
By late afternoon, one man was killed after falling off his boat in Nova Scotia and some 210,000 homes and 940,000 people in the region were without power.
Greater Moncton International Airport canceled all flights on Saturday, and Halifax Stanfield International Airport was under partial operation.
Earl lashed several hundred kilometers of the US East Coast seaboard last week with heavy rains and strong winds, disrupting holiday plans for millions and prompting evacuations in North Carolina.
It had also prompted hurricane warnings in the northeastern US state of Massachusetts, notably its vacation destinations including Cape Cod and the tiny islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
However, while residents battened down the hatches, the storm dealt the region only a glancing blow.
“We had a lot of hype, but no action, which was good,” the wife of a former attendant at the historic Chatham Lighthouse on Cape Cod said on Saturday.
“It’s over. There’s blue sky, sunshine, very little rain,” said the woman, adding that winds and rain were strong overnight, but did not cause major damage.
Authorities were clear: Coastal communities dodged a bullet.
“We’re ecstatic it didn’t happen,” US Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Craig Fugate, told reporters, referring to the expected devastation.
US communities suffered “very minimal impacts,” with no reports of fatalities, he said, and states were shutting down their emergency management centers.
Residents of North Carolina were mopping up after a storm surge flooded roads on the low-lying barrier islands, as the high winds caused sporadic power outages.
Local residents hunkered down along the beach paradise’s commercial spine, Route 28, parallel to the Atlantic.
They awoke to sunshine on Saturday, and quickly began pulling down plywood from storefront windows.
“We were really ready to get blasted, but we got lucky,” said Ray Coombes, a recreational sailor who summers in West Yarmouth on Cape Cod and removed his boat from the water on Thursday in anticipation of the storm.
Weather watchers said Earl was still the most powerful storm to threaten the northeastern US since 1991, when Hurricane Bob killed six people.
However, it left balmy weather in its wake on the US coast.
Fugate cautioned that the US was still 87 days away from the end of hurricane season.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS