Take a walk through the Glace Bay Food Bank and it's hard to miss the large fans drying out the bottom floor.
The entire basement was covered in water Wednesday morning after the sewer backed up because of a storm the day before.
“We're looking at all of the floors being torn up,” said Linda MacRae, coordinator of the Glace Bay Food Bank. “Some of the gyprock is going to have to be replaced and some of the food got soggy because the orders were out for this morning.”
Tuesday’s storm also knocked out power to thousands across the province. Some are still without electricity Wednesday.
“[After] Fiona, we were without power for roughly seven days. And now, like I said, I’m going on 16 hours now without power and they're showing a restoration time of 6 p.m.,” said Shawn Rose, a local resident.
Many feel outages are becoming more common. Some blame Nova Scotia Power (NSP) for not doing proper maintenance.
“I’m quite worried and concerned with, where we live in a rural community, that with just the Band-Aid on everything, we're going to lose the power a lot this winter. And in my area, when you lose the power, you also have no water,” said resident Melanie Sampson.
NSP says over 4,000 trees have been trimmed since post-tropical storm Fiona, and workers continue to clean up the damage daily.
“Fiona was an historic storm, our restoration was historic and the work we are doing after Fiona is historic,” said Matt Drover, a senior director with NSP.
The utility is blaming mother nature and its severity for the number of outages.
“We're seeing more events with winds above 80 kilometres an hour, and when we see winds that high is when it really has an impact on trees in the province. And when those trees are damaged by the winds is when we get power outages,” said Drover.
Back at the food bank, a place to help those in need now needs assistance itself.
“I absolutely need help, If anyone can be here at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning because all of the food that's down here needs to be transported upstairs," said MacRae.
