Remembering Hurricane Igor 10 years later
Washouts, floods, power outages, isolation and a death.
Those were just some of the devastating affects Hurricane Igor brought with it 10 years ago on Sept. 21 when one of the worst and most severe weather systems the province had seen in recent history tore through eastern Newfoundland and Labrador leaving behind it a path of destruction worth millions of dollars in damages.
Roughly 20 communities called for a state of emergency in the hours during and after intense winds and heavy rain battered the homes and livelihoods of thousands. Hundreds more communities were isolated from the rest of the province because of heavy damage to roads and access points.
"Everything we had is gone under water. Our truck is covered. Skidoos covered. Everything," said one woman at the time, a resident of Trouty.
"I'm just devastated, myself. I can hardly talk about it."
The community of Trouty was among some of the most severely hit towns in the province.
Hundreds of people more were evacuated from their homes across parts of the island, with thousands having lost power. Some lost their homes entirely.
One man, 80-year-old Allan Duffett, was killed after being swept down a heavily flooded river on Random Island.
The response
It was then premier Danny Williams who was at the helm of the province and tasked with responding to the storm's fallout.
"Tomorrow we'll be on the ground, in the regions, in as many communities as we can as myself, and ministers and members, to see what the needs are. We are prepared to throw all resources at this as soon as we're in a position to do so," Williams said at the time, as isolated community numbers and states of emergency began to grow.
Then prime minister Stephen Harper also made the trip to the island to assess the damage first-hand.
Hundreds of military troops later landed in the province to aid in clean-up, rebuilding roads and issuing supplies to residents who were struggling in the aftermath.
A decade later the province would need a similar response from Canadian Armed Forces members during Snowmaggedon, a record-breaking blizzard in January that gripped much of the province's east coast for eight days under varying states of emergency and even longer until the snow began to melt away.
During the Igor response, military members doled out 95,000 litres of fuel, 60,000 litres of water, and 74,842 kilograms of food to residents.
Helping out
The Canadian Red Cross in St. John's issued 600 cases of water and 150 clean-up kits to those affected on the along the east coast in the days following Igor's hammering.
"I'd just like to throw a bouquet out to Salvation Army here in Clarenville, and to the Canadian Red Cross," said another woman at the time, who was forced to seek refuge at a make shift emergency shelter in a Clarenville school while waiting for roads to be repaired before returning home.
"They treated us [like] royalty."
But it was the people who banded together in such crucial times to ensure they and their neighbours pulled through.
Stories of boat runs packed with essential supplies to cut off towns, while others drove ATVs as far as a trail would allow and then hiked the rest of the way to fill gasoline and propane tanks began to surface as people began to dig in to help one another.
Today, Hurricane Igor is a distant memory for most, but heavy rains over the weekend and subsequent washed out roadways and floods in parts of the province gave a revisiting glimpse to the destruction left in Igor's wake.
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