Lee Batters Maine More Than Expected, Vermont Surprisingly Pleasant

The last of the clouds from Storm Lee leaving 
Vermont Saturday evening had the look of finely
textured marble. 

Former Hurricane Lee is now making its way out of southeastern Canada, fading near the cold waters of the North Atlantic and into history. 

The storm made landfall Saturday about 50 miles southeast of Eastport Maine in an area of New Brunswick, Canada. It skirted just a few miles west of the western tip of Nova Scotia before landfall. 

The eastern half of Maine got pummeled more than I expected. One death was reported when a large tree limb fell on a car in Searsport, Maine. 

Maine is the most heavily wooded state in the nation, so the high winds on soggy ground were able to take down a lot of trees. Some of which hit power lines. Around 11 percent of Maine residents lost power in the storm. Over in Nova Scotia, more than a quarter of the province's population had no electricity, according to the Associated Press.  

Meanwhile, here in Vermont, which isn't really that far from the tropical storm zone, got off even easier than the already optimistic forecasts ahead of the storm. 

Wind gusts had been forecast to be in the 30 to 40 mph range, but ended up being quite a bit less than that. Top wind speed in Burlington Saturday was an underwhelming 28 mph. 

Skies began to clear in parts of the state during the afternoon. The late afternoon and evening in western Vermont proved to be one of the nicest of the summer. 

Temperatures were perfect. Instead of annoying gusts, we had pleasant, soft light breezes.  . The skies were a deep blue, mixed with some finally, pretty, textured high clouds from the remnants of Lee's outflow. 

A NEW ENGLAND MISS OF SORTS

It's true Maine was pretty trashed by Lee, but this storm was yet another miss from a would-be hurricane in New England.  Lee was considered post-tropical by the time in neared Maine and Nova Scotia. And it made landfall just over the U.S. border in Canada. That means New England has not had a direct hit from a hurricane since Hurricane Bob in 1991.  

Irene in 2011 was a tropical storm - a particularly destructive one - by the time it hit New England, so it doesn't count as a hurricane. Floyd in 1999,  Isaias in 2020 and a few others were also former hurricanes, when they hit New England, but were downgraded by the time they got here. 

That's an awfully long time for us to avoid a hurricane. And puts New Englanders out of practice as to how to deal with a hurricane. True, we get big nor'easters which are also intense storms, but hurricanes usually have worse storm surges, more intense winds and heavier rain that nor'easters. 

That 1991 Hurricane Bob is an example of what an happen with a New England hurricane. It was a category two storm at landfall in Rhode Island. The storm killed more than a dozen people and caused $1.5 billion in damage. 

Any hurricane hitting New England would probably be as bad as Hurricane Bob, really. 

OTHER STORMS

While we were focusing on Lee, two other tropical systems have been bubbling along.  For a time Hurricane Margot was moving north in tandem with Lee, but it was several hundred miles to the east of that system. Since then, Margot has declined into a tropical storm, and should completely fall apart in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean today or tomorrow.

Elsewhere, as the old, obnoxious song by XTC goes, we're only making plans for Nigel.  But not that many plans, since Tropical Storm Nigel so far doesn't appear to be much of a threat, either. Nigel is expected to quickly grow into a hurricane, and a fairly strong one at that. But it will move north through the central Atlantic Ocean and poses no threat to the United States or Canada.

Another cluster of thunderstorms is forecast to move westward off the coast of Africa this week and that one will probably grow into a tropical storm or hurricane. It's way, way, way too soon to know what that thing will do.