On September 24, 2022, Fiona — a hurricane that became an “extratropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds” around the time it made landfall — did major damage in Atlantic Canada. Today, five stories that demonstrate local resilience despite an uncertain future.

She came in through the bathroom window
For 10 years, Arnold Huber had been building his dream home in Lismore, N.S., where some of the warmest waters north of the Carolinas kiss the Northumberland Strait.

“I was just about to finish the bathroom,” says the master carpenter, who lives in Dartmouth with his wife and two teenagers. “It was a beautiful place with the finest amenities: in-floor heating, high-efficiency electric boilers. I was going to put in solar panels. Then ... all gone.”

Then came Fiona. Huber, who weathered the storm in Dartmouth just in case he and his tools were needed, got the news from a neighbour on the North Shore: “He said, ‘Your place was levelled. The roof came off. The walls collapsed in on themselves.’”

Not long after, he and his son Evan viewed the devastation.

“I’d half-thought my friend had been kidding,” he says. “But as I approached, I’m sure my face turned as white as a ghost’s. We could barely make it up the road because the power lines were strewn everywhere. There was just this one little path and we had to weave around the downed trees.”

A year later, Huber has rebuilt: a roof with trusses reclaimed from the wreckage, new walls, and spray-foam insulation. He’s tempted to say it’s as good as the original, except it’s better. “Something like this ... well ... it teaches you.”

Huber had bought the property, a former wilderness camp for kids about 37 kilometres northeast of New Glasgow, at an auction in 2008. His idea was to transform it into a year-round home for his family and his wife’s parents. Work began in earnest in 2015. In the end, the two-storey house measured 4,000 square feet with large windows facing the sea. “Huh,” he grunts, “that was a mistake.”

If tornadoes hate trailer parks, hurricanes feel the same way about sliding glass doors and French balconies. “They sort of disappeared,” he says. “My neighbour experienced the same thing. His patio door popped right out in the middle of the night. It took all his and another guy’s strength just to get it back into place.”

Huber’s new single-storey dwelling is 2,500 square feet with a more gradually sloping, steel roof, which gives the structure a lower profile against high winds. What’s more, he says, “I’ve spent a lot of time on extra fastenings and water proofing. Plus, we can still have these little bedrooms tucked up into the dormers of the roof without risking a whole second floor.”

Even with these adjustments, Huber says he’ll never feel complacent. “I consider myself lucky in the face of this adversity. I’m a carpenter. But there are people who have been literally destroyed by Fiona. I had my wife and kids, family, and friends, who all came together. New relationships emerged from this.”

And the material, devastating effects of what many are now certain is long-term human-manufactured climate change?

“Whatever people think about climate change ... the storms ... the storm surges ... they are real,” he says. “The world is going to have to adjust.”

The best defence against nature is nature
The news from the frontlines of Fiona on Prince Edward Island was grim. In mere hours, the storm had washed away hundreds of kilometres of coastline. Millions of trees were down. The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimated the cleanup could cost $1 billion.

Bianca McGregor and Kaylee Busniuk of the Island Nature Trust continue the work their organization has done for decades.

“The way to prepare for events like Fiona has always been to protect natural areas in perpetuity,” says McGregor, the executive director of the non-profit that’s been managing and conserving woods, rivers, beaches, bogs, and marshes on P.E.I. since 1979.

Adds Busniuk, the Trust’s land stewardship manager: “Nature absorbs a lot of the impact. During Fiona, for example, intact ecosystems soaked up much of the abnormally high tides and rain.”

That’s not to say they’ve let nature entirely take its own course. To the areas under their stewardship, they’ve sent teams to clear trails, assess damage, and plant appropriate native species to hold the soil.

“Our philosophy is to give nature time to heal and take a hands-off approach unless the impact of human activity on  the landscape has been too great,” McGregor says. “Once we get a better overview of the impact, we can decide if active management is necessary.”

That’s an important distinction. While Fiona may be exactly what you get following decades of human-caused atmospheric warming, it doesn’t come with instructions to prepare for the next big one.

“Fiona’s severity was wildly different across the province,” Busniuk says. “Some areas were hit pretty significantly, and then in other areas, not a tree was down … The majority of the areas that were impacted will regenerate on their own. Forests are used to disturbances. Gaps in the forest canopy will help to create an uneven-aged forest which results in a more diverse and resilient forest plus new habitat. Woody debris from Fiona will decompose and create more nutrient- dense soil.”

While the province’s North Shore dunes took a major hit, they also form a dynamic ecosystem. “We have to wait for ocean currents to bring back that sand,” Busniuk continues. “With the creation of more cobble or gravel beaches, some of the dune changes have actually been positive for the endangered piping plover.”

But more than extreme weather, human activity, overdevelopment, and negligence, is “the biggest threat to nature and ecosystems on P.E.I.,” McGregor says. “Recent projections regarding population increases are cause for concern. As the most densely populated province in the country, we are lacking in healthy, robust, diverse and connected ecosystems and wild spaces. (We need to) demand better policies from governments.”

What’s more, since 87 per cent of land on P.E.I. is privately owned, “we (also) need support from private landowners to … protect large contiguous natural areas.”

Seeing a new forest for its trees
Fiona was the second tempest in four years to cross the carefully wooded paths of Otter Ponds Demonstration Forest. But, overnight, the hardy band of ecologically minded woodland managers — who typically measure their progress over decades — knew they had a problem.

“First, this area suffered a lot of damage from (hurricane) Juan in 2003,” says Wade Prest, a veteran forester and member of the group that, among things, mops up after hurricanes on its 485-hectare Eastern Shore lot outside Halifax. “Then, in 2019, we had Dorian. The storms have been coming more frequently, from more directions, and packing higher winds than ever before; so, when Fiona came along last fall, we weren’t exactly sure what, if any, long-term planning we should do.”

Otter Ponds cuts timber for market using what its marketers say are “the best forest practices presently known,” while “enhancing the social and cultural value of the forest.”

The Nova Scotian government, plus company Northern Pulp, working with four community groups, established the site in 2010. It demonstrates, as Prest likes to say, “a lighter touch” than industrial harvesting. Resource restoration — clearing, salvaging, selecting just the right species of trees to plant — is the goal. And the approach has worked amiably enough for years. But what if nature has other plans?

Prest says, “We’re facing a situation where we’re not sure if the Acadian forest, itself, is going to change as a result, or if it’s something that we can restore as quickly as the climate changes. We got a whole lot of questions right now.”

None of which has stopped them from dealing with Fiona’s immediate aftermath, including reducing the amount of salvaged wood. “In areas where there’s less than 50 per cent of wood (on the ground), we won’t be doing any salvage work.

That’s to ensure there’s a lot of coarse, woody debris that, over  the next 50 years, rots away into the soil and holds water and feeds the ecosystem. Before now, we wouldn’t have done that; we might have left only 20 or 30 per cent on the ground.” The group also plans to plant more varieties. “Red spruce is traditionally our most economically important species,” Prest says. “But it’s not a deep-rooting tree; it’s susceptible to blowdown. We have to move away from that and start, for example, more Eastern white pine, which is quite wind-firm. Eastern hemlock is another long-lived species that helps to improve the wind-firmness of stands. Red oak is a species we’d expect would do better in Nova Scotia and be more prominent than it has been. Still, it likes a different kind of soil than we have at Otter Ponds.”

And there may be other problems.

Climate change promises faster and more furious weather, plus it invites a greater variety of invasive, and commercially devastating, bugs that would prey on otherwise hardier, more wind resistant, Nova Scotian trees. Otter Ponds may be only a model approach to environmental restoration and resilience, but the implications are broad.

“Natural forest management is better,” Prest says. “But the disruption in the forests due to storms like Fiona has been so substantial, I can’t really say that the way we do things now will be (viable) in the future.”

The rescuer keeps rescuing
Velda Tapp-Pretty would’ve left with all the others on Water Street who escaped to higher ground and safety mere hours before Fiona hammered their homes in Port aux Basques, N.L., but Terry the cat had other ideas.

“No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get that cat to go into the carry kennel,” says the personal care worker who also operates an animal rescue in the coastal town where she was born and raised. “He was just terrified. So, I stayed in my house after the evacuation order, waiting for him and watching the storm through my front window.”

Now, a year later, she still shivers remembering the scene.

“The top of my next-door neighbour’s place, not 30 feet (10 metres) away, completely split off,” she recalls. “Then, the sea came up and took the bottom of it ... I mean, we get a lot of wind here in Port aux Basque, and we’re used to bad storms, but nobody figured it was going to be like this.”

When the worst of it was over, the windward side of the community of 4,000 looked apocalyptic. Buildings were gone. Bedsprings, microwave ovens, electric driers, and the like cluttered the shoreline. Hundreds were sheltered or homeless.

Tapp-Pretty’s was the only house still standing as far as she could see. “I finally left around 11:30 that morning, and I will never forget the feeling,” she says. “There was someone else’s rooftop in my driveway and everything else you could think of. It was like going through a maze... I honestly can’t understand how some people don’t believe in God, you know?”

For many here, it’s safe to say, thanking The Almighty hasn’t been the first priority. The town is recovering, but the progress has been slow and painful. The provincial relief package of $200 per square foot of ruined home (plus an additional stipend for the land on which it sat and compensation for lost possessions) isn’t exactly a king’s ransom.

Meanwhile, dozens of still-upright, but ruined, domiciles have been demolished. “Many people will never get back what they lost,” Port aux Basque Mayor Brian Button told CBC Radio in March, adding that the traditional seafaring attitude in many has changed. “Some are in their 70s, and … they’re not going to live by the sea anymore and they can’t build where they lived in the past. Their response is: ‘I don’t ever want to live by the water again.’”

Tapp-Pretty, who is 58, understands. She lost her home to the wrecking ball, and had to relocate three times from temporary places, over the past year. She fi nally found a house high on a hill, away from the shore, where she jokes she’s more likely to be hit by a helicopter than a hurricane.

“It’s a beautiful six-bedroom place,” she says. “I was able to take the money from the provincial government, pay off the mortgage on the old place, and buy this one ... I’m opening up a boarding house.”

She considers a future that will include more storms like Fiona. “I don’t know anything diff erent to do in my life. I’ve developed this animal rescue over the past seven years and rescue work is addictive. I see the difference that I can make in an animal’s life and I can’t just bail out now, right?”

If he could talk, Terry the cat, who did finally come back and who’s still with her, would agree.

Co-operation beats Fiona’s fury
For Osborne Burke, a tempest whipping in from the North Atlantic underscores the value of community self-reliance. The general manager of Victoria Co-operative Fisheries of Neil’s Harbour, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, is still cleaning up after Fiona ravaged the town of 400, home to his seafood harvesting and processing operation, which buys the catches of up to 120 crews and has about 150 workers.

“We were behind a breakwater, but that didn’t make any difference,” he says. “The building just couldn’t take it. Part of the first floor was missing. One of the walls on the second floor was hanging down. Even the concrete walls caved in. All told, it was in excess of $3 million to $4 million, between structural and processing equipment … But we came back. We’re bigger, better, and more ready than ever.”

A traditionally run fishing enterprise, one with absentee owners and imported managers, might have shut down. But Victoria Co-op, which local credit unions financially support, has been a community enterprise for 67 years. It would survive. But not by chance.

“Fiona provided an opportunity, in a way, to demonstrate the power of the co-operative mission,” he says. “The reason the co-op started here in the first place was the effect of a different kind of disaster, of big buyers coming in from outside during the peak season and then, just as quickly, going away.”

It was an effort to break the company-store model. “People depended on the merchants for everything,” Burke explains. “People owed the merchants money before they could even get started on the next fishing next year. So, they wanted to take control … What would happen if our co-op disappeared? We wouldn’t have our elementary schools. We wouldn’t have our high school, because families would have already left.”

The co-op has a contingency fund at the Bay St. Lawrence Credit Union. “The board and our bank was behind us, so we got the contractor on site the Monday after the storm, taking pictures, and looking at stuff , and seeing what we could do,” Burke says.

Will Victoria Co-op face another year like the last one? “The point is we’re set up to deal with that, too,” Burke says.  “In 2021, we had a $1.5-million profit. Being a co-op that’s determined to survive for other-than-strictly-bottom-line reasons, we have the advantage of being able to grow a little wiser as we grow older. We know there’s always another Fiona around the corner.”