Authorities are searching for an 80-year-old man who was swept out to sea by Hurricane Igor on Newfoundland’s east coast Tuesday, according to the RCMP.
Police confirmed a man was washed into the sea around 10 a.m. Tuesday “when a driveway collapsed from underneath him due to heavy water flow.”
Police said they are unable to provide many details because the roads leading to the community of Britannia are washed out and extreme weather has prevented search-and-rescue crews from using aircraft.
Newfoundland and Labrador has been pounded by Igor — which was downgraded Tuesday afternoon to a tropical storm — as torrential rains and heavy winds left large areas of the province without power and several coastal communities cut off as rising water washed out roads and flooded homes.
Several towns declared a state of emergency, including Marystown on the province’s Burin Peninsula, where water has inundated numerous homes and forced a number of families to evacuate homes.
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Marystown Mayor Sam Synard said the damage to the community is extensive. According to Environment Canada, the town received more than 200 millimetres of rain by Tuesday afternoon, and the rain had not yet stopped.
“In my lifetime, I’ve never seen a storm like this,” said Synard, a lifetime resident of the town of 6,500. “The rain was almost ominous, it was violent. We had high tides, heavy winds and rain — those are three great characteristics of a perfect storm.”
Mary Lou Antle, the mayor of Beau Bois, a community just outside of Marystown, watched the storm destroy a heritage building on the town’s Atlantic coast.
In a video shot by Antle and posted to YouTube, water can be seen rushing from a pond that Antle said overflowed its banks, causing a brook that runs down into the harbour to become a raging torrent, destroying the only road into town.
A bright red barn can be seen being swept up by the water and washed out to sea.
As the massive system approached, Environment Canada issued a hurricane watch for much of the eastern part of Newfoundland.
Environment Canada forecast wind gusts of up to 150 km/h with rainfall amounts up to 150 millimetres on the Avalon Peninsula and as much as 250 millimetres over the Burin Peninsula, on the southeast coast.
Chris Fogarty, program director at the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Halifax, said the storm tracked closer to the eastern edge of the province than previously forecast.
St. John’s experienced its heaviest winds on Tuesday afternoon as the back end of the eye of the storm passed over the more populated areas of the province.
“The top wind speeds of the storm are actually increasing,” he said. “Wind gusts in the storm are higher today than they were yesterday.”
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