Cape Breton bears brunt of freezing rain storm

With several washed-out roads and widespread power outages, Cape Breton has taken the brunt of a freezing rain storm that swept through the province Saturday night and into Sunday.

"It's significant damage, for sure," said Bonnie MacIsaac, deputy warden of the Municipality of the County of Inverness. "We have a lot of trees down."

Several roads are washed out in the area from heavy rain and melting snow. MacIsaac said nine roads in the area were already in rough shape.

"Some of these were just barely made passable in the last week, and here we areset back by this," she said.

She said she'll be contacting the province to assess the damage and ask for emergency funding.

"All the trees froze, power lines, everything was totally frozen," said Alyssa Basker, who lives in Inverness. "Trees were snapping off, power poles were breaking."

Basker's husband captured a video on his cell phone of a washed-out road. Basker said she had never seen anything like it.

"In our backyard, our tree is in pieces on the ground," she said. "There's some roads that were full of trees, all over the road. Even our basement flooded. We had a foot of water in it."

Basker'shousehold has been without power since 9 p.m. Saturday night. She said the estimated restoration time is about 6 p.m. Sunday, but with strong winds expected throughout the evening she's worried about further damage.

The Inverness Volunteer Fire Department opened its fire hall as a comfort centre for people to get food, a warm drink, and a chance to charge their devices.

Most of Inverness County remains without power.Nova Scotia Power's outage map says restoration in most areasis expected by 10 p.m..

In Cape Breton County, several roads in the Sydney have been closed since Saturday evening dueto flooding from heavy rain.

Around 9:30 a.m. Sunday, the Louisburg-Main--DieuRd. was washed out and is closed. The Cape Breton Regional Municipality is asking people to use alternate routes until further notice.

Rainfall warnings lifted

Rainfall warnings across the province were lifted around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.

ALes Suteswind warning is in effect for Inverness County, with maximum gusts of 90 km/h expected to start weakening in the evening.

Environment Canada expected between 30-80 millimetres of rain to fall Saturday and into Sunday, which has also caused flooding in low-lying areas.

Freezing rain warnings had been in effect in parts of the province throughout the morning. They endedaround 2 p.m.

Thousands without power

Thousands of NSP customers woke up on Easter Sunday withoutelectricity. At its peak, there were as many as 13,900 outages across the province Sunday morning.

Crews were still dealing with outages into the evening, with more than 6,500customers still in the dark as of 5:30 p.m., according to the utility'soutage map.

Most of the outages were located along the coast of Cape Breton's Inverness County, as well as in Antigonish and Guysborough counties.