At 12:10 a.m. on Monday, September 29, 2003, the worst storm to hit Nova Scotia in more than a century made landfall near Shad Bay. It took a few hours for hurricane Juan to tear across the province, but it left a trail of devastation in its wake. Juan killed two people, leveled homes, ripped apart the province’s electricity grid and turned forests into splinters. It carried a terrible punch—winds gusted up to 175 kilometres per hour—and it has left a mark that won’t soon be erased. The reporters and photographers of The Chronicle-Herald documented the storm, the damage, the tragedies, the struggle to cop and the recovery effort. The paper served as a vital lifeline to the hundreds of thousands of Nova Scotians without power. This book—the story of Juan—is built around the best of that coverage.

Stephen Maher is a columnist with Postmedia News, covering national politics on Parliament Hill since 2004, often writing about corruption and electoral wrongdoing. In 2012, after he and a colleague uncovered a telephone voter suppression campaign, he won several journalism awards, including a Michener Award, a National Newspaper Award, and the Canadian Hillman Prize. Stephen lives in Ottawa.

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