In Nuuk, people don’t worry too much about the weather. So last week, when I saw people preparing for an approaching storm, it was obvious it was going to be something unusual. On the day before the storm, a bus driver announced to passengers that we should check the website or Facebook page the following day to see if the buses were running. As I walked up the hill toward home, I passed a man securing loose items on his boat and tightening the straps holding it to the ground. At home, I saw a text message from a neighbor asking us to bring everything inside from our deck or tie down anything left outside.
In the morning, the sky was dark, but the air was still. My son had left for school as usual. By nine, there was still not a breath of wind, though the forecast for an hour ahead was for twenty metres per second (over seventy kilometres per hour, or almost forty knots). Then, I noticed the grey clouds over the ocean, surging across the sky. The ocean appeared lighter in the distance. It was white caps clipping across the surface and meeting the darker water at a clean line that moved steadily toward the shore. A puff of wind lifted a flurry of snow from the ground and whirled it down the street.
By ten, as forecast, the wind was blowing twenty metres per second and gusting over thirty. I watched from the living room window, which bent and shuddered as the gusts slammed against the house. By early afternoon, the storm had reached its peak, blowing at a sustained twenty five metres per second and gusting much higher. By the time school finished, the storm had only crept back a notch and now, with blowing snow and low visibility, the buses were cancelled. I called my son.
“You’ll have to wait until someone can come and pick you up or the buses start again,” I said. I could feel the dark shadow of his knitted brow in the silence he returned down the phone line.
“I’m sorry sweetheart. Is your friend waiting there too?”
“No. He walked home.”
“Really?!” I replied. His friend did live closer to the school, but it was certainly blowing at the limit of what a small boy might be able to endure and still remain on the ground.
Through the dark afternoon, the wind blew relentlessly. I lay under a warm doona with my sleeping baby, his breaths calm and steady as the wind outside ramped up and down in waves and slammed suddenly against the wall in violent gusts. Now and then, the wind caught under the eaves and the rafters in the attic above me juddered unnervingly. I wondered if the roof would be suddenly ripped from over us. It wasn’t such a wild thought. When the wind finally abated the following day, the damage was significant.
Shipping containers in the port had fallen, large rubbish skips had blown over and rolled away. Some neighbours had flying debri smash through their car windscreen, others through their living room window. A rubbish bin had ripped from its fixings to the outer wall of a nearby building and landed in the surging stream across from our house. There it lay through the night, its crushed metal frame flailing in the wind. A trampoline, including its metal stand, was wrapped high around a telecommunication tower. Even the cladding had been stripped from an apartment building.
Later in the day, the wind still sustained at twenty metres per seond, but with the buses running again, my son made his way home. He stomped up the stairs and threw himself bitterly on the couch, angry at being stranded at school for so long, but not the least concerned about the weather he had just come through.
The next morning, the wind had abated just a little. My husband walked our son to the bus stop to make sure he wouldn’t be lifted by the gusts. By the time school ended, later in the day, the storm had finally lost its power and a soft snow was falling. At its height, the wind had teetered on the edge of hurricane force and was certainly the most powerful storm in our six years in Nuuk, reaching over thirty metres per second (close to a hundred and ten kilometres per hour, or almost sixty knots). But now, a week later, I am not sure my son remembers anything but the irritation of being stranded at school for a few hours.
