Nova Scotia has a very chilly weekend ahead.  A blast of Arctic air will combine with what are expected to be northwest gusts of 60 to 80 km/h Friday night into Saturday to produce a wind chill making it feel like -35 degrees or colder for parts of all three Maritime provinces.  Nova Scotia and P.E.I. haven’t had an extreme cold warning since like this since 2015. 

 

Nova Scotia’s minister responsible for the Emergency Management Office says yesterdays two-hour 911 service disruption should never have happened. Nova Scotia RCMP reported that 911 lines were experiencing technical difficulties across the province.  Service was also interrupted for some areas of New Brunswick and P.E.I. Bell Aliant restored the lines for all three provinces by 9:30 a.m. The cause of the outage was a software update in preparation for 10-digit dialing for New Brunswick, which triggered an unexpected call processing failure to 9-1-1.

 

Pharmacists at some Nova Scotia pharmacies will soon be able to provide more health-care services as part of a new pilot project. The Community Pharmacy Primary Care Clinics program will be piloted in a dozen pharmacies across the province. Clinic appointments open Wednesday and more locations are expected in the spring. The province says participating pharmacists will have dedicated time to see patients with common illnesses and people on medications for chronic diseases. Shoppers Drug Mart in New Glasgow is one of the participating pharmacies in this project.