Hurricane Igor Pounds Marystown

Hi all:

Just a little note to update you on the effects of Hurricane Igor who pounded the Burin Peninsula and Eastern Newfoundland on Monday and Tuesday past. It was probably the worst ever storm to hit our area. There are reports of 239 mm of rain in St. Lawrence, 197 mm in Bonavista and 120 mm in St. John's as well as wind gusts to 137 in St. John's and 130+ in Grand Bank. We didn't seem to have high wind gusts here in Marystown but we had lots of rain. You have to remember that all this rain came in less than a 24 hour period so the town's infrastructure just wasn't able to keep up with the amount of water that fell. From some of the photos of Marystown below you can see how much water we had to deal with.

We had a little water in one end of our basement - in the laundry room. I think it may have come in through a window there as the window is sent in a little window well and it filled with water. There was not water there at 4:00am but by 8:00am we did have some. I had it cleaned up in a couple of hours. We got off very lightly as you may have seen from some of the video on national tv news shows.

Even though there was a state of emergency here in town on Tuesday, we fared much better than other towns especially those in the Clarenville area. There was a lot more destruction of trees, roads, bridges in those areas. However, a lot of people had up to 5 feet of water in their homes. I talked to one lady last night whose basement flooded as the storm sewer backed up and she had 21 inches of water come in. She had just done her basement last year and it looks like everything was spoiled.

On the Burin Peninsula, the road is washed out between St. Lawrence and Lawn, as well as bewteen Grand Bank and Marystown, the road to Petite Forte, the road to Terrenceville and the bridge on the BP highway at Rattle Brook collapsed so we are cut off from the rest of the island. These other places are isolated. On Thursday, gas stations are out of gas and there isn't a lot of fresh food to go around. Apparently there is a "bailey bridge" on the way and should be in place tomorrow afternoon to allow trucks through with food, gas, etc. This is a portable prefabricated bridge used by the military to temporarily put in place without any special tools or equipment but allows fairly heavy equipment to pass over it. Right now the target to get that in place is Friday afternoon.

However right now reports are that it will take over $100 million dollars to makes repairs to roads, homes, etc. over the next few weeks and months.

Below are some photos taken by other people of the Marystown area as well as a few from our golf course which received no structural damage but did have a lot of flooding. It should be open again by Friday or Saturday.

Hope this gives you all some idea of what we faced. I have included on the photo the area shown there.

Take care.
Regards.
Barry