As the Bahamas, Florida and other parts of the coastal United States recover from hurricane Dorian, the Canadian Maritimes have been strapped in, bracing for the worst.
And while it seems Canada’s east coast is in the clear now, the storm apparently brewed up a monster 100-foot wave offshore, near Newfoundland. To put it in perspective, that’s taller than an eight-storey office building.
The Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland owns buoys out at sea fixed with sensors that read ocean activity. On Saturday night, one of them detected the tidal wave.
READ MORE: Hurricane Dorian: B.C. man goes to great lengths to bring Bahamian family to the Okanagan
Three other waves nearby reached up to 75 feet.
A graph of the reading shows the record-high wave occurred around 12 a.m. local time.
Bill Carter, director of the Center of Applied Ocean Technology at the school, confirmed that the buoy was operating correctly and the readings are, indeed, accurate.
“I make sure the equipment’s working, which it was,” Carter told the Washington Post.
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“Only 10 minutes of the data from every hour is sent back to shore,” he continued. “There could have been even higher waves during the other 50 minutes. We’ll only know when we get the data off the buoy.”
According to the publication, there wasn’t any rain at the time the wave occurred — or even particularly strong winds, for that matter. Another strange aspect of the incident is that it happened in relatively shallow water. The buoy that caught the reading sits in only 160 feet of water.
READ MORE: IN PHOTOS: Hurricane Dorian arrives in Atlantic Canada
Newfoundland wasn’t the only province to spot such massive waves.
Meteorologist Simon Lee shared findings from a buoy floating just off the coast of Nova Scotia that picked up a 50-foot wave.
Simon tweeted that this same buoy “reported a 100.7 foot wave during ‘The Perfect Storm’ in October 1991.” (He’s referring to the 2000 movie about the storm that generated the wave.)
Though Dorian is no longer classified as a hurricane, it left a lot of damage in its wake as it calmed down over Canada.
READ MORE: New Brunswick picks up the pieces after hurricane Dorian
The storm downed trees, ripped roofs off of homes, collapsed a construction crane and left many people without electricity.
The death toll in The Bahamas, where the hurricane most devastatingly hit, reached up to 50 people on Monday and it is expected to climb.
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