Hurricane Juan: the most powerful and deadly storm to hit Atlantic Canada in 50 years

Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Juan's arrival in Atlantic Canada. The Category 2 hurricane brought sustained winds of 152 kilometres per hour amid excessive rain.

Chris Fogarty remembers the moment 20 years ago when he transmitted a weather bulletin warning that hurricane Juan would make landfall near Halifax, churning out gusts at 140 kilometres per hour.

With the storm’s arrival only 36 hours away, the meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre was worried the alert would be ignored.

“We had gone through almost two decades of very little hurricane impact in Canada,” Fogarty said in a recent interview, recalling how Juan would become the most powerful and deadly storm to hit Atlantic Canada in almost 50 years.

“People didn’t really have any memory of recent hurricanes …. There was still a sense that we didn’t get hurricanes in Eastern Canada.”

That sense of complacency stands in sharp contrast to today. In the two decades since Juan made landfall on the morning of Sept. 29, 2003, the East Coast has been lashed by several intense tropical storms, including Igor in 2010, Arthur in 2014, Dorian in 2019 and last fall, Fiona, the most costly weather event in the region’s history.

And earlier this month, in the days ahead of post-tropical storm Lee arriving in the Maritimes, there was seemingly endless discussion on social media about weather warnings, computer models, ocean temperatures, barometric pressure and, of course, climate change.

That wasn’t the case in 2003 as hurricane Juan barrelled towards Nova Scotia. Few people had smartphones. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit had yet to launch. And there was plenty of skepticism about hurricane forecasts.

“Even with the official warnings out, people were still feeling that the forecasters were overdoing it,” Fogarty said.