Hurricane Lee barreled over the North Atlantic into New England and Eastern Canada on Friday, threatening the region with soaking rains, strong gusts, and a life-threatening storm surge over the weekend. According to the Canadian Hurricane Center, Lee is projected to weaken into a strong tropical storm before making landfall in southwestern Nova Scotia as a strong tropical storm on Saturday afternoon.
Despite this, the storm has the potential to drop up to 4 inches (10 cm) of rain and bring winds of up to 60 mph (97 kph) in certain areas, prompting officials in the United States and Canada to warn residents to prepare for flooding and power disruptions.
Tropical Storm conditions were forecast in southeastern New England on Friday night, according to the United States National Hurricane Center, which issued a tropical storm warning for hundreds of miles of coastline from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, affecting around 9 million people.
"Please plan ahead of time to stay indoors if possible on Saturday and check on your loved ones and neighbors," said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in a statement to the city of 650,000 people.
For more than a week, Lee has been churning a big hurricane over the Atlantic, momentarily threatening Bermuda but mostly posing no threat to anyone on shore.
However, by Friday afternoon, it had sustained gusts of up to 80 mph (130 kph), and "Lee is expected to be a very large and dangerous storm when it reaches eastern New England and Atlantic Canada," according to the National Weather Service.
Forecasters predict a storm surge of up to 3 feet (91 cm) in some areas, including Cape Cod in Massachusetts and eastern Halifax County in Nova Scotia.
The storm was about 290 miles (465 km) southeast of the Massachusetts island of Nantucket as of 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) on Friday, moving north at about 20 mph (31 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center. The weather office predicted that it will gather up pace and weaken over the day. Lee is the latest storm in what has been an active hurricane season with a higher-than-average number of named storms.
