The building was an old one but the folks at Wedgeport Boat Ltd. were still surprised to see it shifted off of its foundation from strong winds that blew through the region from Dorian on Saturday, Sept. 7.
By the end of the day Saturday, the mould shop used to construct boat hulls at Wedgeport Boat Ltd. was a collapsed, crumpled mess.
No one was injured as the building was unoccupied. That is the most important thing, says an owner of the company.
And while the building was used to build hulls – which are the shell of a boat – the all-important moulds of the hulls used for such construction were outside across the road.
“It’s a good thing there were no moulds in the shop, there was just a hull. We had just taken all of the moulds out Thursday,” says Skip Muise, an owner of the boat company.
Muise was in Halifax on Saturday and first saw the damage through photographs.
Dorian was a tropical storm as it passed by southwestern Nova Scotia on Saturday, but was still categorized as a hurricane as it was heading towards the central part of the province. Still, it had high sustained winds in southwestern Nova Scotia and some gusts late in the day Saturday in Yarmouth County were well over 100 km/h with gusts of 110 and 129 km/h recorded at the Yarmouth airport.
Downed trees and downed power lines accounted for much of the damage from the storm in this tip of the province.
READ MORE ABOUT STORM DAMAGE IN SOUTHWESTERN NOVA SCOTIA HERE
At Wedgeport Boat Ltd., Muise said the winds pushed the building right off its foundation.
“This is an old building, I want to say it’s 80 years old, maybe. It belonged to Pat LeBlanc a long time ago. From the looks of it the wind just shoved it right over,” said Muise. “It looks like it shifted the whole thing 10 feet.”
Obviously any damage a company suffers never comes at an opportune time and this case is no different. Muise says the boat shop is “swamped and busy” with orders.
“It’s not a good thing to have happened,” he said.
But, he says, the damage won’t have any impact on workers. He said they were at the stage with projects where hulls being moved into other buildings on the property for further work.
“I’ve got a boat in that shop, a boat in that shop, a boat there. I won’t lay anybody off because of it. We’ll just have to schedule around it,” he says.
POWER RESTORATION
Nova Scotia Power crews were out early Sunday morning, working to restore power as soon as the weather made it safe to do so, after being ordered to stand down earlier Saturday when winds surpassed 90 km/h. By 12:30 a.m., the number of customers without electricity stood at about 350,000. There are around 500,000 customers in the province.
"At this time, we expect the full restoration effort to extend over the course of this week," Karen Hutt, president and CEO of NSP, said in a news release Sunday morning.
NSP is working on securing additional crews to add to the 1,000 personnel already in place, making it the “largest restoration effort the company has ever amounted in response to a weather event.”
MORE ABOUT DORIAN FROM SALTWIRE NETWORK:
CLEANUP BEGINS AFTER HURRICANE DORIAN RIPS THROUGH MARITIMES
CRANE COLLAPSE IN DOWNTOWN HALIFAX 'HOLY COW MOMENT' FOR DAL STUDENT
