Workers with CN Rail assess the damage to a washed-out rail line outside of Truro, Nova Scotia.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
Update: The body of a 52-year-old man and the unidentified remains of another person were recovered in Nova Scotia on Monday. On Tuesday, the RCMP announced they had found the remains of the two missing children.
Four people, including two children, are still missing after a catastrophic weekend rainfall in Nova Scotia that has destroyed dozens of roads and bridges and forced hundreds of people from their homes.
A deluge of rain, more than 200 millimetres in 24 hours in parts of the province, caused flash flooding Friday and Saturday, leading Nova Scotia’s Premier Tim Houston to declare a state of emergency.
“It’s incredible to see the force of the water and the impact it’s had,” Mr. Houston said Sunday at a news conference, at which he profusely thanked first responders.
He said damages could amount to “tens of millions, could be in the hundreds of millions” of dollars, and that the province filed a request for disaster financial assistance with the federal government, which could be helpful in covering uninsurable costs.
Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said Sunday night that the request has been approved.
An intense search continued all weekend for the four missing people, who were lost after rushing waters caused by torrential rains engulfed the vehicles in which they were travelling. On Sunday, divers searched murky floodwaters in a field in the Brooklyn area of West Hants, 65 kilometres northwest of Halifax, where the people were reported missing in separate incidents on Saturday.
Search teams used industrial pumping equipment to lower the water level of the field, said RCMP spokesperson Corporal Guillaume Tremblay. “We’re going to keep searching and we’re not going to give up hope,” he said.
The identities of the four missing people have not been made public.
West Hants Regional Municipality Mayor Abraham Zebian said he’s staying optimistic. “It’s a very sad situation,” he said. “Our hearts and prayers go out to those families today.”
The torrential rains left many people, including Jodi Stuart, frantically racing to find higher ground.
It was after supper on Friday night when Ms. Stuart, 50, and her two children heard the piercing sound of the fire alarm inside their third-floor apartment in Bedford, N.S. She called out to nine-year-old Avery and 15-year-old Wyatt, to grab their raincoats and flip flops.
She knocked on the door of her 89-year-old neighbour, and holding the family’s two bunnies, Cocoa and Zeplin, in a cat carrier, Ms. Stuart pushed on the first exit she came across. The door wouldn’t budge – behind it was a wall of water.
Ron Crawford climbs up a ladder onto a washed-out bridge after checking on stranded neighbours near McKay Section, N.S. on July 23.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
Rain poured down as the four sloshed through knee-deep water, holding their elderly neighbour between them. Water was up to the bumper of Ms. Stuart’s Hyundai Elantra.
Ms. Stuart described Friday night’s harrowing drive around unnavigable flood waters and blocked roadways. Finally, she found a walking path she could drive up to higher ground. She called various hotels, but the rooms were too expensive – $500 a night – and so the four of them parked on the side of a suburban road, cranked the heat, and dozed fitfully through the night to the sound of pounding rain and booming thunder.
She is one of hundreds of people still displaced from their homes in Nova Scotia. Mr. Houston said about 500 to 600 people remained displaced Sunday afternoon and that water levels, although receding, were still high in some areas. He said 19 bridges were damaged and six others were destroyed in the storm.
Mark Peachey, of the Nova Scotia Department of Public Works, said crews were at work to reopen roads as many remained impassable Sunday and at least 50 have been washed out.
CN Railway pre-emptively closed a section of its track near Halifax Friday because of flash flood weather warnings, spokesperson Scott Brown said. Crews were inspecting the track and making repairs Sunday, but some repairs “will be delayed until weather and water events subside,” he said. Photos showed a railway bridge with footings washed out, tracks and cables sagging over a brown rushing river near Truro, N.S.
More than 2,000 customers were still in the dark Sunday afternoon, according to Nova Scotia Power.
On Saturday, a bus brought Ms. Stuart and her daughter Avery to a Red Cross evacuation centre in Dartmouth, N.S. Lying on a cot, she described how this is the second time in the last two months that Avery has been forced out of her home because of natural disasters. In early June, Avery lost her childhood home in Hammonds Plains, where she lived part-time with her father, when it burned to the ground during the devastating wildfires that destroyed 150 other homes in the area.
“She says, ‘Mommy, are we going to lose our second home? Are we not going to have a home at all,’” Ms. Stuart recalled her daughter saying as Avery shot hoops nearby.
“It feels like it’s just trauma-ville,” she added, referring to the wildfires and now the flash flood. “I want to take Mother Nature and slap her right in the kisser: Stop with all this climate crap.”
The heavy rainstorm, which dumped between 200 and 250 millimetres along Nova Scotia’s South Shore, across the Halifax area and into central and western parts of Nova Scotia, followed an unusually dry, hot spring that set the stage for historic wildfires in the province.
Jodi Stuart and her nine-year-old daughter Avery at an evacuation centre in Dartmouth, N.S., on July 23. Avery lost the home she also shared with her father to a wildfire in Hammonds Plains in early June.Lindsay Jones/The Globe and Mail
Glenn McGillivray, the managing director of the Western University-affiliated Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR), said the rainstorm was “absolutely in line with the science on climate change.”
A warming climate “doesn’t cause these things, but it certainly makes them more probable, and it makes them worse” as the hotter atmosphere holds more moisture, he said, adding “a whole new level to that rainstorm.”
Mr. McGillivray said the province and affected municipalities should make sure to build more resilient infrastructure and use available tools such as the institute’s infrastructure protocol to “build it for the future weather, not the past weather.”
Anabela Bonada, manager and research associate at the Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation, affiliated with the University of Waterloo, said municipalities should make sure to incorporate more permeable surfaces and green spaces to soak up such heavy rainfalls – and would then also be better prepared to face heatwaves. “Our cities are not prepared for this climate that we have now,” she said.
Homeowners should also consider small things like emptying their gutters, putting coverings around their basement windows, and installing a sump pump, she said.
Ms. Bonada and Mr. McGillivray both emphasized that it was important not to build in harm’s way, such as on floodplains, to mitigate losses because of natural disasters.
Mr. Houston said there would be a debrief with municipalities to ensure that the impact of climate change is taken into account going forward.
“The impacts of Mother Nature on our province have been obvious to everyone,” he said, citing catastrophes like Hurricane Fiona last fall and this spring’s wildfires.