Hurricane Fiona drenched Bermuda with heavy rain and buffeted the Atlantic island with hurricane-force winds on Friday as it tracked northward toward Nova Scotia, where it threatens to become one of the most severe storms in Canadian history.
Fiona had already battered a series of Caribbean islands earlier in the week, killing at least eight people and knocking out power for virtually all of Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million people during a sweltering heat wave.
Overnight, the storm approached Bermuda as a Category 4 storm but diminished a notch to Category 3 as it passed well to the west of the British territory. Still, gusts reached as high as 103 miles per hour, the Bermuda Weather Service said in a bulletin.
The Bermuda Electric Light Co, the island’s sole power provider, said about 29,000 customers, or more than 80% of its customer base, had no electricity on Friday morning.
But Michelle Pitcher, the deputy director of the Bermuda Weather Service, said the territory appeared to be largely unscathed.
“It’s been a long night but there are no reports of injuries or fatalities,” she said. “There may be people with roof damage, but so far we haven’t heard of anything bad. As I said, we build our houses strong.”
Many Bermuda homes are built with small shuttered windows, slate roofs and limestone blocks to withstand frequent hurricanes.
By late Friday morning, Hurricane Fiona was about 600 miles (970 km) south of Halifax, the Nova Scotia capital, moving north at 35 mph (56 km per hour) with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
