Thousands mired in Igor aftermath

Thousands of Newfoundlandlers remain deprived of key services and face countless troubles returning to normal life, seven days after Hurricane Igor ripped through the eastern part of the province.

"This is the worst disaster we've ever had in my lifetime," said Betty Fitzgerald, the mayor of Bonavista, one of the towns that was hardest hit by the Sept. 21 hurricane that dropped as much as 238 millimetres of rain in a day and had winds peaking at 172 km/h.

"We have never experienced anything like this," Fitzgerald told CBC News on Tuesday. On Monday night, Fitzgerald and her fellow councillors voted to extend a state of emergency, as the town grapples with washed-out roads and depleted supplies, including fuel and food.

On Tuesday, military engineers were moving a portable bridge into place in Trouty, a tiny community on Newfoundland's Bonavista Peninsula that Igor left in tatters. This type of bridge — a staple of emergency provisions for decades — will be used in many communities that were left stranded by last week's ferocious storm.

The Canadian Forces have been on the ground since Saturday, bringing emergency aid and starting work on an overwhelming list of repairs to reconnect tens of thousands of Newfoundlanders who have been cut off from main road access. The most serious cases are in rural coastal communities with single-road connections to regional highways, which themselves were fractured.

By Monday evening, regional highways on both the Bonavista Peninsula and the Burin Peninsula were reopened for the first time, albeit with sometimes crude links that allow only one car to pass a time.

The military's first effort has been the Trinity Bay community of Trouty, which Igor practically upended with intense rain and wind. Military engineers were designing a bridge that would reunite the two ends of the small town.

"It's like a nightmare that we can't wake up from," said resident Josephine Johnson, who met Defence Minister Peter MacKay Monday.

"You get up in the morning and you think you can go on, but you don't know what to do or where to start."

MacKay toured the rubble-strewn streets of Trouty with Gen. Walter Natynczyk, the Canadian Forces chief of defence staff, during a stop on Monday.

Johnson said she was grateful to see the military and to meet MacKay.

"We're trying to help one another, but just to know that someone like that would come and help us? It's overwhelming today." 

Calls have swamped the Newfoundland and Labrador government's emergency operations centre, which received more than 800 in one 24-hour period alone this week. The centre is managing responses to calls that vary from reports of new landslides to appeals for food and shelter.

Mike Sampson, who heads the province's fire and emergency service, said all calls will be handled, though priority is being given to the most pressing cases.

"We're doing our best to get back to everybody," he told CBC News. "The instruction is that we will return all calls. We ask people to be patient."