Halloween night a quiet one in N.B.
Published Monday November 2nd, 2009
The biggest trickster was the weather
Although a quiet Halloween was reported around the province early in the evening, the ghosts and ghouls were howling up a storm by about 9 p.m. on Saturday.
In the true nature of All-Hallows Eve, the high-pitched whining of the winds, that soared to gale-force levels, could be heard well into the wee hours of the night.
At one point, wind gusts in Metro Moncton were reported to have reached 90 kilometres (56 miles) an hour.
Marianne Limpert of Fredericton, communications officer for NB Power, said yesterday that during its peak about 1 a.m. yesterday morning, she said there were upwards of 13,000 people without power across the province.
The fact that there were still leaves on the trees worsened the situation, said Limpert. She explained that the gusting winds had a "sail-type" effect on the leaves, putting additional pressure on the limbs causing them and sometimes the tree, itself, to break off and fall across the lines.
The biggest single outage occurred about 10:45 p.m. in Bathurst when a transmission line was severed, leaving 9,000 customers in the dark, said Limpert.
She said no part of the province was spared from power failures during the wind storm, with the hardest hit areas being Bathurst, Moncton, Bouctouche and Woodstock. The Moncton and Bouctouche areas experienced close to 6,000 outages.
Claude Tremblay of Fredericton, media relations officer for the RCMP in New Brunswick, noted that as far as vandalism goes, on the whole, it was a pretty good Halloween. He said there were no "serious incidents" anywhere in the province.
Tremblay said there was some of the usual mischief associated with that night, such as putting debris on the road and burning tires. "The biggest spots for this activity were Salisbury and Oromocto. And even in those locations, there was not a lot of it."
The major Halloween problems this year involved the heavy winds blowing trees and branches onto power lines.
Don McCabe, deputy chief of operations for the Moncton Fire Department, said it was quiet this year in terms of the usual Halloween mischief.
Instead, he said the weather took centre stage and gale-force winds kept the firefighters, NB Power and others on the go well into the night.
McCabe said the winds broke power lines, creating hazardous situations for fires, including instances of leaves being set on fire. He said power lines were down on the Old Shediac Road, in downtown Moncton and all over the place.
This kept the fire department busy right up until about 3 a.m. yesterday morning, said the deputy chief.
A spokesman for Codiac Regional RCMP said they had a higher than normal number of people picked up for intoxication on Friday night. He suggested some of them may have been celebrating Halloween a day early.
But on Halloween night, itself, he said there was some of the usual mischief in Metro Moncton, but nothing of a serious nature.
It was quieter than the average Halloween, he said.
Const. Ed Goodfellow of the Miramichi Police Department, said Halloweens are a lot tamer than they were years ago in the area. He said vandalism was a lot worse on Halloween in the old days in Miramichi.
But it has improved greatly since then, said Goodfellow. "There are always a few problems, but this year, we fared quite well."
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