The impacts of Hurricane Fiona were felt across the Atlantic provinces. And while Prince County, PEI avoided the most devastating impacts of the storm, the effects of those impacts compounded over time as downed trees caught debris found in the Caruthers, Cain’s and Trout Rivers, leading to more severe blockages.

“There were a lot of blowdowns,” said Dale Cameron, project coordinator of the Prince County chapter of Trout Unlimited Canada. “The blowdowns themselves aren’t necessarily the end of the world, but then they catch other things, like debris in the Spring. And if you’ve got a blockage, then water is trying to find away around and then you’ve got a bank washed out or having lost a fish passage. So we wanted to get things opened back up because we had pretty good conductivity prior to that.”

To support these efforts, trees were planted earlier in the year to replace some that were felled in the storm. Then, over the course of the summer, workers set about chopping up blockages and removing them. There were some logistic challenges – in some cases, access to the blockages was extremely limited and difficult, necessitating several hour walks to find access points. The work was largely carried out by hand with tools such as chainsaws.

“You get a pile of logs and debris that’s 25 meters deep, you’ve got to block it all up with a chainsaw to a manageable size and get it up on the bank,” said Cameron. “Sometimes we’re lucky enough and one of the logs are at the correct angle, we can pile something behind it and make a deflector out of it.”

Trout Unlimited Canada Prince County Chapter Inc. applied to the FCAS to support the effort and received $23,504, which was in addition to funding from a few other sources. Cameron has observed that these types of extreme weather patterns do seem to be happening more frequently in recent years. So, it seems like that the Prince County chapter will likely be reapplying to support similar clean up efforts in coming years.

“We had quite a mess after Dorian as well,” said Cameron. “These big hurricanes that we’re getting now definitely take their toll, both on the riparian zone and the mess to clean up in the stream afterwards. We always get a little bit of that stuff naturally anyway, but it certainly increases the amount and scale.”