As the climate continues to change and storms take on a more powerful presence in the world, more scenes like the one that played out last week will continue across the globe. While the world keeps a watchful eye on Ian, which is headed toward Florida as we speak, several areas have barely had time to recover from the battering they took from last week’s storm. The powerful storm Fiona started from the south, wiping out Puerto Rico’s power, and continued its barrage all the way to Newfoundland in Canada. With the never-before-seen trail of destruction, officials say it will take several months to restore the infrastructure to the five provinces of Canada that were hit by Fiona’s vengeance.

“It’s like a complete war zone,” said Brian Button, mayor of Port aux Basques, one of the hardest hit towns on the southwest tip of Newfoundland with just over 4,000 residents. More than 20 homes were destroyed and the cost of damages “is in the millions (of dollars) here now,” Button said in an interview with Reuters.

Residents from Newfoundland, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick are expected to be without power. “When it’s all said and done … Fiona will turn out to have caused the most damage of any storm we’ve seen,”Tim Houston, Nova Scotia’s premier, told the CBC.

With power poles snapped in half, trees toppled, and roofs ripped off buildings, Fiona landed in Nova Scotia at 3 am this past Saturday. It landed with winds of 90 mph as a post-tropical cyclone.

“It’s shocking the damage that we’re seeing,” Houston said Saturday. Officials say that it will likely take weeks for the damage to be corrected. Prince Edward Island experienced a storm surge of 6 feet, with what experts are saying is the worst damage they have ever seen.

Armed forces from Canada’s federal government are moving into the area to remove the detritus of the storm so that power companies can move in and restore power to the area as soon as possible.

Even though the Canadian Hurricane Center estimated that Fiona was actually the lowest-pressure storm to make landfall according to records, it has packed a punch and caused major trouble across five provinces. In 2019, Dorian hit the region around Halifax, Nova Scotia, knocking out power and a construction crane, but it was nothing like this.

According to Adnan Zai, Advisor to Berkeley Capital, “With climate change being a thing, areas of the globe that did not have to worry about it previously, are now being forced to bolster their climate defenses in order to cope.”

If the world is going to make peace with the more vengeful climate that is sure to keep coming at us, we need to create policies that will combat the effects of climate change. The time is now, as we are about to reach the tipping point, and enter a time of no return. Life on earth is too beautiful and too fragile not to do everything we can to make a change for the health and safety of the future.