Everything around us is in motion. It is normal. We are in the Magdalen Islands. The wind makes the landscape dance. His whistling is constant. We hear it without hearing it.
Madelinots have always learned to live with the wind and see how it shakes or carries away everything around them. Telling them about a storm doesn’t really shock them anymore. Until Storm Fiona came.
Starting from the south, in the Atlantic Ocean, it goes north without touching land. The post-tropical cyclone is heading directly toward the Maritimes and Magdalen Islands. He reached the islands on September 24, 2022, exactly a year ago to the day.
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Full trajectory of Storm Fiona in September 2022.
Photo: NOAA and Canadian Hurricane Center
Denis Lefaivre is then responsible for issuing storm surge warnings from the Maurice Lamontagne Institute in Mont-Joli. These are fluctuations in sea level that are due to atmospheric conditions. Fiona is very focused and maintains her almost hurricane-like character as she approaches the shore. That’s what’s extraordinary, he remembers.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), pressure at the center of a storm reaching Canada has never been lower. Under the combined effect of this pressure difference, which causes the water to rise, the wind and the tides, waves up to 6 meters high sweep across the islands and the southern Gulf.
The wave is impressive, it is very high. It makes a hell of a noise with the wind. It hits the cliff, you see a mass of water being thrown everywhere. All you see is water.
Fiona traverses Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and the Magdalene Islands. She only spends a few hours on the islands, but it’s enough to change the coast.
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Marion Bandet and Denys Dubuc prepare to take photographs of the coast with a drone.
Photo: Radio-Canada
In the following weeks, teams led by Pascal Bernatchez, research chair in coastal geosciences at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, will travel across the islands to conduct topographic surveys of beaches and measure coastal erosion. from permanent measuring stations scattered throughout the islands.
We follow Stéphanie Friesinger and Patrice Lapointe almost at running pace. They measure the distance from the top of the cliff to the beach at fixed points around the islands. You will travel the route that separates more than 450 of the 1,200 terminals scattered along the coast.
There is great interest in these measurements because they allow scientists to compare the setbacks from Storm Fiona alone with the average setbacks from previous years. These measurements have been carried out in the Magdalen Islands for almost twenty years.
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Pascal Bernatchez is Professor and Research Chair in Coastal Geosciences at the University of Quebec in Rimouski (UQAR).
Photo: Radio-Canada
The Passage of Fiona reveals impressive coastal retreats, reaching up to 17.8 meters in some places, reveals Pascal Bernatchez. The eastern part of the coast was particularly affected by the waves, particularly the Bay of Plaisance.
The average retreat rate for Placentia Bay after the Fiona Passage was 6.2 meters, which is significantly higher compared to the average rate since 2005 which is 0.6 meters.
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Map of the southern part of the Magdalen Islands and Plaisance Bay where the storm struck.
Photo: Radio-Canada / François Dubuc
A few months before the storm, work to protect the historic site of La Grave in the southeast of the island had just been completed. The so-called resurfacing involves raising the beach from coarser materials to protect buildings from the onslaught of waves.
Funded by Quebec’s Ministry of Public Security, the structure is 650 meters long, 30 meters wide and 3.5 meters high. The beach is a kind of energy absorber, a very effective mechanism that nature has found to break up the energy of the waves. And much of this happens through flooding, explains Yann Ropars, an engineer specializing in coastal infrastructure and designer of the La Grave Charge.
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A few months before Storm Fiona, construction work on the beach fortifications at the historic site of La Grave in the Magdalene Islands was completed.
Photo: Municipality of Îles-de-la-Madeleine
On the day of the storm, strong northerly waves hit the recharge head-on for hours. The profile of the charge suddenly softens as the energy of the waves is dissipated by the new beach. Despite everything, some buildings are flooded and submerged by the rising waters of the lagoon on the opposite side of La Grave.
Being submerged in the water here, south of La Grave, is a shock to experience. The images are also very strong. We remain influenced by this.
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Sonia Painchaud is the owner of a business that was flooded on the La Grave site during Storm Fiona.
Photo: Radio-Canada
At the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Charles Caulet, a postdoctoral researcher in coastal modeling, was able to reproduce wave breaking without beach recharge using digital models and real data recorded during the storm.
The simulation shows that without the beach replenishment, the buildings on the La Grave site would have suffered from wave breaking and submersion from rising water on the lagoon side.
The Magdalen Islands are at the forefront of climate and surface water temperature changes in the Atlantic. Madelinots are not used to fearing storms, but the last ones they have experienced, Dorian in 2019 and then Fiona in 2022, suggest storms of greater intensity and temporal proximity, storms different from those that the islanders have experienced in the past.
You say to yourself: This could be something we’ve never seen before. We have less certainty.
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Yvan Cormier lives on the Îles-de-la-Madeleine.
Photo: Radio-Canada
Does Fiona provide an overview of the coming storms and changes to the landscape that lie ahead for the islands? The loss of ice cover in winter, coastal erosion and the movement of sediments being removed from cliffs and dunes: these are all factors that could change the known profile of the Magdalen Islands.