'Messy' storm with snow, rain, ice and wind coming to N.B. on Wednesday
New Brunswick is in for some bad weather this week.
Environment Canada has issued special weather statements for the entire province, calling for a "significant storm" on Wednesday that will bring wind gusts of up to 90 km/h along the Bay of Fundy and Bay of Chaleur.
"We're just looking at a really messy system to affect the province with snow, rain, and wind and even some elevated water levels," said Environment Canada meteorologist Jill Maepea.
Maepea said the system will start out as snow for the whole province, but areas closer to the Bay of Fundy in the south will turn to rain. Communities in the north of the province will see up to 15 centimetres of snow while the south will get up to 15 millimetres of rain.
"I think the snow and wind will be the big story across the province," Maepea said.
She said this storm will be "completely different" from one in December that knocked out power to more than 100,000 customers
Strong winds will impact the same areas around Charlotte County, Maepea said, but won't be as powerful inland as they were last time. The storm will bring more snow than last time.
The Harvey area was one of the hardest hit by the December storm right before Christmas, with many downed trees causing prolonged outages. (Ed Hunter/CBC)
N.B. Power spokesperson Dominique Couture said in an email that the utility is monitoring the storm and has secured additional contractor crews to respond, if needed.
"We will continue to refine our response based on the latest weather updates and are ready to respond should outages occur," Couture said.
Mayor urges residents to prepare
One of the places hardest hit by the December wind storm was Harvey, near Fredericton, where residents endured prolonged outages.
Mayor Richard Corey is urging residents to start stocking up on food supplies and getting generators ready.
"As a community, we haven't had the luxury of time in between this one and the last one to make some changes that we would like to make around warming shelters," Corey said.
At the community's council meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Corey said the main point of discussion will be better co-ordination of communication for councillors and the mayor in the event of power outages.
During the the December storm, Corey told CBC News he needed clearer information from N.B. Power and the provincial emergency measures organization. He said when he asked for updates on restoration estimates, he was told to check the N.B. Power website, which is the same resource that's available to the public.
Harvey Mayor Richard Corey wants residents to be prepared, and expects communication from N.B. Power to be better this time around. (Ed Hunter/CBC)
"My concern last time was not having a definitive message that I could share with my constituents to say we're going to be out for three days. In the end, I had that information but we were almost there by then," Corey said.
Since then, Corey said his message has been received by N.B. Power and he's sure communication will be better this time around.
He said he doesn't believe his constituents had lost faith in the utility after the long outages in the last storm, and were grateful when crews were able to restore power.
"We can only see what's in our backyard, we can't see when the major lines are down somewhere and it's more important to get the major lines up and running than it is to deal with the local issue in our community," Corey said.
Along the Bay of Fundy, where some outages lasted nearly a week, Eastern Charlotte Mayor John Craig said there are still many trees down.
He said meetings are planned Tuesday with EMO to make sure missteps of the last storm aren't repeated.
Craig said there were challenges ensuring that emergency vehicles had gasoline when all the local stations were out of power and fuel.
Despite the long power outages, Craig also said people in his community were happy with N.B. Power workers' response in December.
"I think people were happy to see those guys out there last time. That storm was so big it would have taken any company that long to fix it," Craig said.
This time around, he wants residents to be ready.
"Just be prepared for 72 hours without power," Craig said. "We hope it doesn't come to that, but be prepared."
