Remembering Hurricane Igor 10 years later

Washouts, floods, power outages,isolation and a death.

Those were just some of the devastating effects of Hurricane Igor 10 years ago, on Sept. 21, 2010, when one of the worst and most severe weather systems the province had seen in recent historytore through eastern Newfoundland and Labrador, leaving behind a path of destruction that did 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 communitieswere 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. Ski-Doos covered. Everything,"said one woman at the time,a resident of Trouty.

"I'm just devastated, myself. I can hardly talk about it."

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, and thousands lost power. Some lost their homes entirely.

Allan Duffett, 80, was killed after being swept down a heavily floodedriver 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 cleanup, rebuildroads and issuesupplies to residents who were struggling in the aftermath.

A decade later the province would need a similar response from Canadian Armed Forces members during Snowmageddon, 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 out95,000 litres of fuel, 60,000 litres of water, and 74,842 kilograms of food.

Helping out

The Canadian Red Cross in St. John's issued 600 cases of water and 150 cleanup kits to those affected along Newfoundland's 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 tothe Canadian Red Cross,"said another woman at the time, who was forced to seek refugeat a makeshift emergency shelter in a Clarenville school while waiting for roads to be repaired beforereturning home.

"They treated us[like] royalty."

But people who banded together in such crucial times to ensure they and their neighbours pulled through.

There were stories of boat runs packed with essential supplies to cut off towns, and of others who drove ATVs as far as a trail would allow and then hiked the rest of the way to fill gasoline and propane tanks.

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 provided an echo ofthe destruction left in Igor's wake.

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