Dorian topples crane, knocks out power in eastern Canada

TORONTO — Dorian arrived on Canada’s Atlantic coast Saturday with heavy rain and powerful winds, toppling a construction crane in Halifax and knocking out power for more than 300,000 people a day after the storm wreaked havoc on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Residents of Nova Scotia braced for heavy rainfall and potential flooding along the coast, as officials in Halifax urged people to secure heavy objects that might become projectiles. Businesses were encouraged to close early.

“We do not want the citizens of Halifax roaming downtown as the water is coming in,” said Erica Fleck, assistant chief of community risk reduction in Halifax, the provincial capital and home to 400,000 people.

A crane toppled and crashed into the side of a downtown apartment building under construction. In the city’s south end, a roof was ripped off an apartment complex, and firefighter Jeff Paris said several apartment buildings were being evacuated. With the collapsed crane and all the down trees and power lines, it’s fortunate there are no significant injuries or deaths, he said.

“The power went out hours ago, but we were well prepared,” said Tim Rissesco, who lives on the east side of Halifax harbor in Dartmouth. “We’ve got snacks and food and we’re hunkered down in the house playing board games and watching the rain and the wind.”

As Canada prepared for Dorian, floodwaters receded Saturday from North Carolina’s Outer Banks, leaving behind a muddy trail of destruction. The storm’s worst damage in the U.S. appeared to be on Ocracoke Island, which even in good weather is accessible only by boat or air and is popular with tourists for its undeveloped beaches. Longtime residents who waited out the storm described strong but manageable winds followed by a wall of water that flooded the first floors of many homes and forced some to await rescue from their attics.

“We’re used to cleaning up dead limbs and trash that’s floating around,” said Ocracoke Island resident and business owner Philip Howard. “But now it’s everything: picnic tables, doors, lumber that’s been floating around.”

Howard said by phone Saturday that flooding at his properties on the North Carolina island is 13 inches higher than the levels wrought by a storm in 1944, which he said had long been considered the worst. He raised his home higher than the 1944 flood level and still got water inside.

“It’s overwhelming,” said Howard, who owns the Village Craftsmen, a store that sells handcrafted pottery, glass and kitchen items. He said much of the merchandise on the lower shelves is ruined. Pieces of pottery were floating around inside.

Inside his house, the floorboards were buckling and curling up after being warped by the water, he said.

Gov. Roy Cooper said about 800 people had remained on the island to wait out Dorian. The storm made landfall Friday morning over the Outer Banks as a far weaker storm than the monster that devastated the Bahamas . Yet despite having been downgraded to a Category 1 storm, it still sent seawater surging into homes on Ocracoke, many for the first time in memory.


More than 1,100 Bahamians arrived in Palm Beach, Florida, after being evacuated by cruise ship from their hurricane-battered islands.

The Grand Celebration cruise ship returned to its home port after setting sail Thursday for Freeport, Grand Bahama, to deliver more than 112 tons of supplies and ferry dozens of health workers and emergency crews.

The storm made landfall Saturday evening near Sambro Creek, about 24 kilometers south of Halifax with maximum sustained winds of 161 kph.

Forecasters said the center of Dorian was expected to move across Nova Scotia, pass near or over Prince Edward Island, and then move to Newfoundland and Labrador on Sunday.

Canadian officials prepared for the possibility of flooding, washouts and storm surges, and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the military was mobilizing to assist Nova Scotia.

Novia Scotia Power Inc. reported more than 300,000 customers were in the dark by 7 p.m., with power out in parts of Halifax, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Karen Hutt, the utility’s chief executive, said Dorian is the largest weather event the company had ever responded to, and 1,000 workers were ready to restore power once it’s safe.

Hurricanes in Canada are somewhat rare in part because once the storms reach colder Canadian waters, they lose their main source of energy. Canadian Hurricane Centre meteorologist Ian Hubbard said the last hurricanes to make landfall in Canada were Hurricane Igor and Hurricane Earl in September, 2010.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Dorian was officially a post-tropical cyclone, not a hurricane, though it still packed hurricane-force winds.

Dorian lashed the eastern tip of Maine with heavy rain, strong winds and high surf as the storm passed offshore. Several hundred homes and businesses lost power.

In North Carolina, the governor said officials were aware of no serious injuries on the Outer Banks from the storm. About 200 people were in shelters and 45,000 without power as of mid-day Saturday, according to the governor’s office. Emergency officials transported fuel trucks, generators, food and water to Okracoke.

At least five deaths in the Southeast were blamed on Dorian. Four were men in Florida or North Carolina who died in falls or by electrocution while trimming trees, putting up storm shutters or otherwise getting ready for the hurricane. North Carolina officials said a 67-year-old man died Friday in Pamlico County after he collapsed while cleaning storm debris.

Dorian slammed the Bahamas at the start of the week with 295 kph winds, killing at least 43 people and obliterating countless homes. From there, it swept past Florida and Georgia, then sideswiped the Carolinas on Thursday, spinning off tornadoes that peeled away roofs and flipped recreational vehicles.

Ocracoke resident and restaurant owner Jason Wells said he lost three vehicles and a golf cart to floodwaters, and he has $5,000 worth of food in a freezer on an island that still lacks power. He said by text message Saturday that he and family members were already bleaching and disinfecting their houses, but he feared weeks could pass before electricity returned to most houses because of wiring problems caused by floodwaters.

“We are a close knit community. We will power on,” Wells wrote. “We will persevere. We are family. Time to get to work.”

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Pearl Jam, Boston cancel North Carolina concerts over new LGBT law

RALEIGH, N.C. — Two rock bands have become the latest to cancel concerts in North Carolina because of the state’s new law on LGBT rights.

In a statement issued Monday on the band’s website, Pearl Jam called the law “a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens.”

The statement says the band has communicated with local groups and will give them money to oppose the law.

Pearl Jam was scheduled to perform April 20 at PNC Arena in Raleigh.

Earlier Monday, the rock group Boston also announced plans to cancel concerts because of North Carolina’s new law regarding the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Guitarist Tom Scholz announced the group’s decision on its Facebook page. Concerts were scheduled for Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh early next month. TVJ

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

A test of Christmas conscience

‘We don’t do Christmas. We save the money, spend it on ourselves for once. Not a dime on food we won’t eat or clothes we won’t wear or gifts no one needs… It’s a boycott…”

That’s Luther Krank making a prodigious proposition to his wife, Nora, in a favorite Christmas novel of ours.

Plotted so simply it takes only 177 pages to tell—and tell in considerately leaded print yet—the novel is the most uncharacteristic by John Grisham. It is not any of the legal thrillers he has made his name for, but it’s the one Grisham we have chosen to keep, in fact the only Grisham this little condominium nest in which Chit and I have been living our simplified senior lives can take for volumes. And how it has proved worth the keeping—it’s the one title that leaps at us in these morally anxious times!

As light and funny as the times it is related to are grave, indeed tragic, “Skipping Christmas” (Doubleday, 2001) would seem an irreverent point of reference. It’s about a couple who, left alone this one Christmas, decides to, well, skip it, leave the neighborhood to its suddenly senseless and wasteful communal traditions, and fly away on Christmas Day itself, for “10 days of total luxury” on a cruise! It’s certainly no way to do an occasion that precisely calls for selflessness and moderation—if Christmas is indeed that.

As it happens, it is a case where the moral lies in the perversity—in the self-centeredness, in the profligacy, in the whole hypocrisy that surrounds Christmas.

At no time has our own Christmas conscience, as a nation, come under a test so severe as now. The occasion is a tragedy that compares with no other: Whole communities laid waste by a typhoon of unequaled fury, 6,000 dead and counting. And what facile reaction among the untouched: How to do Christmas without appearing insensitive.


Twisted

It’s a reaction in the same sick class as the old wisecrack that passes for native, popular wisdom, here updated:

Before we proceed to gorge ourselves at Christmas, let’s be reminded of our starved brethren in Leyte, so that they may be able, at least in spirit, to partake with us.

Something is definitely morally twisted here. Christmas is no mere red date on the calendar, no blanket excuse for making merry, let alone in the most abysmal sense. Christmas is a noble spirit; it lifts and redeems and moves the inhabited as profoundly as he is seized by it.

Although, by force of tradition, it is activated more at this time of year than at any other, it chooses no season. And one thing it precisely cannot ignore is such cries as those issuing from Leyte.

Leyte, to be sure, is no simple case of fate—unstoppable, unchangeable, therefore excusable. It’s been brought to its desperate pass strictly by human hands, conscienceless, plundering hands acting out of the old self-feeding habit of greed and working schemes that, by the exploitation of the environment for profit, have left the masses of already poor vulnerable yet to the elements; and, by official corruption, have robbed them of their due from the wealth and opportunities their own nation has to offer.

Lest they be mistaken for pleas for charity or philanthropy, the cries from Leyte are only rightful demands for payback for moral debt owed generations that cannot be even remotely assuaged—but in fact mocked—by skipping Christmas.

Memorable, too, though not as resonant as “Skipping Christmas,” probably because its title lacks the ring that suits the times and its Christmas setting feels but incidental, is an even shorter novel (101 pages), actually down-billed as a mere “tale”: “A Different Kind of Christmas” (Random House, 1988). It’s one of two books we’ve kept by Alex Haley; the other being his Pulitzer Prized “Roots.”

It’s a morality tale more direct and timeless with its message than “Skipping Christmas,” and not light or funny at all. It’s about a young man from 19th-century North Carolina who forsakes family and class, and all the power, privilege and wealth that go with it, to lead a mass escape of slaves, some his family’s own, into freedom on Christmas Eve.

Now, that, for all its relative shortcoming in salesmanship, makes for a more felicitous inspiration.

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net