by Cameron Scott

Created on: September 26, 2010   Last Updated: September 27, 2010

Hurricane Igor will go down in Canada's record books. Never before has a full-strength hurricane hit Newfoundland. The waters around Newfoundland are usually too cold for a hurricane to maintain its strength and remain tropical, but Hurricane Igor managed it.

Igor is not the wettest hurricane to strike Canada. That record belongs to the remnants of Hurricane Harvey, in 1999. Igor comes in third, behind Hurricane Beth in 1971. However, Hurricane Igor smashed all previous records in Newfoundland. No other Canadian hurricane has dropped as much rain over as much territory. The remnants of 2001 Hurricane Gabrielle, considered disastrous at the time, don't even come close.

At 1,480 kilometres wide, Igor is also the largest ever Atlantic hurricane by gale force winds diameter, not just in Canada, but ever since Atlantic records have been kept. It reached that size just before striking Newfoundland. Even when just a category 1, Igor's hurricane force winds extended outward nearly 165 kilometres from the eye! The entire island of Newfoundland is only 500 kilometres wide. As a result, every part of Newfoundland experienced hours of gale force winds and soaking rain from Igor, and nearly one-third of Newfoundland experienced hurricane force winds.

Igor's Canadian story begins after the hurricane passed Bermuda. Fortunately for Bermuda, Igor's strength had fallen to a low category 1 just before reaching the island, down considerably from a high category 4, just the day before. Bermuda received a day of heavy but not excessive rainfall, about 75 millimetres altogether, with wind gusts of up to 150 kilometres per hour. Downed trees and power lines cut electricity to two-thirds of Bermuda's residents, but there was very little other structural damage.

After passing Bermuda, Igor began to intensify once again as it turned to the northeast. This matched the predictions. If Igor had stayed on that projected path and stayed more or less the same size, it would have missed Newfoundland altogether.

However, at 2 am on September 21, Igor's direction shifted toward the north. The new NNE course took the eye of this 300 kilometre wide storm on a near collision course with Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, and kept it within a few kilometres of the shoreline all the way north. At the same time, Igor's strong inflow currents remained over the Atlantic. Between this and a slow low pressure trough coming in from the west on September 20, Igor actually intensified again as it approached

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