Islanders work to pick up the pieces on P.E.I.'s north shore

More than 9,000 homes and businesses are still without power on Prince Edward Island almost two weeks after Hurricane Fiona battered the province.

The vistas of the north shore are forever changed. Some homes that stood for decades were swept into the sea.

“We’ve lost whole buildings. The wharves that my dad, and my dad’s cousins, and ultimately my great grandfather, all the wharves they built are all wrecked and destroyed,” said Zach Kurylyk, who came from St. John, N.B., to help his family clean up his uncle’s home.

“We lost the original building that the family lived in 100-plus years ago,” he said.

In North Rustico, one window remains, where two homes once stood.

A nearby wave-break was in a state of disrepair. So when the sea swelled, nothing could be done to hold the storm surge back.

“My family’s been here since the 1840s and it’s sad to see the destruction,” said Kurylyk. “But they’ve been through awful times before and we will get through it again this time.”

Many Islanders on the north shore, where power remains an issue, are still struggling.

About 20 kilometres east of North Rustico, the Brackley Bay Oyster Company started putting out ice a few days after the storm when they realized the power wasn’t coming back soon.

“We just filled a bin of ice, and set it outside the front door of the building, and we did a little post, right, ‘anybody needs some ice, for cooler or whatever,’ and within an hour that ice was gone,” said Robbie Moore, owner of the Brackley Bay Oyster Company.

Stanhope, P.E.I., is another community that suffered a serious loss -- its golf club burned down during the storm.

“It was there, and an hour later, I got a message that said it was on fire,” said Moore. “It’s very unfortunate because that’s a big part of the community here.”

It’s a short drive from the Prince Edward Island National Park, still closed while crews work to sort out the heavy damage there.

“It’s just like a bomb went off in the forest,” said Moore. “Trees [that] were planted, I was told yesterday, 80 years ago, and one night and they’re down.”