FOX Weather continues its on-the-ground coverage of Lee, as the post-tropical cyclone brushes by New England while barreling toward the Maritimes of eastern Canada.
Correspondent Robert Ray reported from Yarmouth in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, where Lee is expected to make landfall Saturday. While the storm is about 50 miles southeast of Ray’s location, it has delivered powerful winds and waves to the Maritimes.
Ray noted wind gusts of up to 50 mph in Yarmouth, 74-mph wind gusts in the east in Halifax and 93-mph gusts on Grand Manan Island, which lies in the Bay of Fundy between Nova Scotia and Maine.
Footage shot at Yarmouth showed the wind whipping through the shoreline vegetation and powerful waves crashing onto the rocky shore. There have been spotty power outages throughout the area, but crews from the electric company will only be able to make a full assessment after the storm passes tonight or perhaps tomorrow.
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“Folks here in Yarmouth, the town of about 7,000 people, are on edge,” Ray said, adding that the peak of the storm at Yarmouth is imminent.
Stateside in Bar Harbor, Maine, FOX Weather meteorologist Michael Estime witnessed first-hand the violent impact of Lee’s wind and 5-9 foot waves Saturday morning. A boat next to a nearby pier became unmoored by the powerful waves and began bobbing up against the pier, before slamming into the seashore.
Some of the other boats in Bar Harbor remained in place, while positioned facing the direction of the wind. According to Estime, this positioning helps prevent the boats from capsizing, which is more likely to happen if the boats are perpendicular to the wind.
He added that crews were aboard many of the boats in the harbor.
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FOX Weather multimedia journalist Katie Byrne reported from farther south in Massachusetts, where some Cape Cod boaters used extra ties to hold back their vessels from the strong winds and to keep them from breaking free as Lee’s waves reached nearly 20 feet in the Cape Cod town of Chatham.
“You got to be up for that,” said one scalloper Byrne spoke with. “Or otherwise, you run up into the rock wall there, and your boat turns to powder.”
Byrne reported wind gusts across Cape Cod reaching over 60 mph. In Chatham, wind gusts reached 38 mph, which was strong enough to bring a tree down onto a vehicle. No injuries were reported from the incident.