Winter storm moves into Atlantic Canada, bringing wet snow and power outages

HALIFAX – A nor’easter descended on Atlantic Canada Wednesday, bringing heavy snow, rain and strong winds to the region.

The storm’s howling winds were blamed for knocking out power to thousands of homes and businesses in Nova Scotia, with outages reported from Yarmouth in the southwest to Sydney in the northeast.

The weather system brought the season’s first snow day to much of Newfoundland, cancelling schools across central and eastern parts of the island. Schools were also closed in P.E.I., but there was a patchwork of closures in Nova Scotia, where the snowfall was particularly light along the Atlantic coast. In New Brunswick, public schools were closed in the southern and eastern regions of the province.

The closures were welcomed by weather officials, said David Neil, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment Canada in Gander, N.L.

“It was definitely a good idea to keep as many people off the roads as possible,” Neil said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. “It’s going to be very, very tricky commute home for a lot of people, especially here in Newfoundland and in parts of Cape Breton.”

The weather system began off the east coast of the United States and made its way toward the Maritimes, skirting along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, Neil said. It was expected to move south of Newfoundland later on Wednesday.

Schools were open across the sprawling Halifax region, which received a mix of rain and light snow in the morning.

Highway closure

However, driving conditions were poor north of the city and into the northern reaches of the province, where heavy snow and poor visibility forced the closure of the Trans-Canada Highway from an area west of Truro, N.S., and across the Cobequid Mountains, which are notorious for rough winter weather. The highway provides the fastest road link between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Environment Canada first issued a mix of orange and yellow snowfall warnings across Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on Tuesday. The yellow warnings forecast 20-30 cm of snow by Wednesday afternoon, while the orange warnings — in northern Cape Breton and in central Newfoundland — called for 30-50 cm by the evening.

Much of the precipitation was forecast to fall as wet and heavy snow, but some rain was expected, especially along the south and east coasts of Newfoundland, Neil said. That transition to rain was expected in the later half of the day, leading to “very slushy driving conditions” in some areas, he said.

But away from the coastlines, the snow was expected to stick around.

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“We are expecting things to continue to ramp up, really through (Wednesday),” Neil said. “By the time people wake up tomorrow morning — or by sometime later tonight — we’re expecting some pretty good accumulations of snow on the ground in a lot of areas in Newfoundland.”

— With files from Sarah Smellie in St. John’s, N.L.