Hurricane Fiona bears down on Canada after brushing Bermuda

The US National Hurricane Center said Fiona was packing sustained winds of near 125 miles (205 kilometers) an hour and was "expected to be a powerful hurricane-force cyclone" when it makes landfall overnight into Saturday.

"It is certainly going to be a historic, extreme event for Eastern Canada," Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist for the Canadian Hurricane Center, told reporters.

"It's a major hurricane... All that momentum is trapped within the storm, so it's very difficult for something like that to actually wind down."

In its latest bulletin, the CHC described the storm as a "severe event" that will "impact Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec with heavy rainfall and powerful hurricane force winds beginning tonight."

At midnight GMT, the hurricane was located just over 200 km south of Sable Island, a small sandy strip off Nova Scotia, and was moving north at a speed of 56 kph, according to the CHC.

Authorities in Nova Scotia issued an emergency alert on phones, saying power outages were likely and people should stay inside with enough supplies for at least 72 hours.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the storm "a bad one," adding it "could have significant impacts right across the region."

In Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, stores sold out of propane gas cylinders for camping stoves as residents stocked up.

"Hopefully it will slow up when it hits the cooler water, but it doesn't sound like it's going to ," Dave Buis of the Northern Yacht Club in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, told Canadian television.