Changelog

The town page now opens with a colored-pencil drawing of a schooner at the wharf below Lunenburg's steep grid of painted houses and red waterfront sheds.

A new tool: type any household item — pizza box, coffee cup, batteries, seafood shells — and it tells you which of the Town's four streams (recyclables, paper, organics, garbage) it belongs in, plus deposit returns and depot drop-offs. It follows the Town of Lunenburg's own program and links the Town's page as the last word; a few items are shifting as Nova Scotia's province-wide recycling rules change, and the tool says so.

Downtown parking trips a lot of people up — the rules changed this spring, and the meters run only part of the day and part of the year. The new Paid Parking page works out, from the time of day, whether you have to pay right now ($2 an hour, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or whether it's free — and it's free overnight, on Sundays and statutory holidays, and all of December, January and February. It also lays out which streets have a two-hour limit, where the free 30-minute spots are, how to pay by coin or the HotSpot app, who parks free, and what a ticket costs. The signs on each street are always the final word; the town's parking page is linked for the exact map.

The emergency department at Fishermen's Memorial Hospital isn't open around the clock — it runs daytime and evening hours and closes overnight, and can reduce its hours at short notice. This new tool works out whether it's open right now, and when it next opens, from the posted hours. It always shows 911 first, the nearest 24-hour emergency room in Bridgewater, and the virtual urgent care hours, and it links Nova Scotia Health's official page because the hours can change. If it's a real emergency, call 911 — the page never tells anyone to wait.

From a resident's request: what goes out each week in the Town's four-stream collection, the 6 a.m. set-out, the summer weekly compost, and where to look up your exact day. Addresses just outside town limits are on the District's separate schedule — that's flagged too.

Clarified that in-town outages go to the Town's own electric utility, not Nova Scotia Power — NS Power covers the surrounding District (MODL). Refreshed the water-meter answer now that the metering program is wrapping up, and removed an electric-rate note that couldn't be verified against the town's pages.

Live Atlantic systems from the US National Hurricane Center, the Nova Scotia season calendar, a South Shore prep list, and who to call when the power and water go out — now pinned to the town page, where it shows at a glance whether anything is active. The benchmark on this coast is post-tropical storm Lee, September 2023.

Lunenburg's waterfront mostly closes after October, the restaurants fill with tour buses in August, and parking is a contact sport. The new Community Picks board asks residents the three questions the town already argues about — what's actually open in winter, where you take visiting friends to eat, and where you really park downtown in summer. Anyone can read; adding a pick takes a free account.

Two staples, tuned to a town with unusual wrinkles: a municipally-owned electric utility with its own after-hours outage line, an ER that closes on short notice (the page explains the walk-in virtual urgent care that stays open, and the 24/7 fallback in Bridgewater), cash-only parking meters, a mandatory water-meter rollout, and the perennial Town-versus-District confusion. Every number was verified against a live official page this week.

Tide tables are the most-requested tool we'd never been able to build honestly — until now. Canada's Hydrographic Service publishes its official predictions through an open API, with a station in Lunenburg harbour itself. The new tool shows whether the tide is coming in or going out right now, today's highs and lows, and the week ahead, in metres and feet. These are astronomical predictions, not measurements — the page says so plainly and points to Environment Canada for storm conditions. This is the platform's first tide tool; the tide-times kind is ready for other Canadian coastal towns.

Ten docs on the town behind the postcard: the Blockhouse Hill housing fight, an electric grid at capacity, parking rules in flux under a new bylaw, an ER that logged roughly 870 hours of unscheduled closures in 2025, and a local news landscape that just lost the Barnacle. Plenty here for practical tools.