Hurricane Earl lashed into the Canadian Maritime provinces on Saturday, picking up wind speed in warm Atlantic waters after a surprisingly tame brush with the US East Coast.

The storm, downgraded overnight from hurricane to tropical storm, again packed hurricane-speed winds when it made landfall in the coastal Canadian province of Nova Scotia.

Winds gusting to 80 mph downed trees, flooded roads and left 122,000 customers without power. The province has a population of about 940,000.

"We are still classifying this storm as a hurricane, based on the overnight presentation of the storm on satellite and radar," said Chris Fogarty, program supervisor at Canadian Hurricane Center. "The eye is still very much intact."

But Earl was a mere shadow of the massive Category Four hurricane that frightened the US East Coast earlier in the week, brushing close to an area with the capacity to refine some 1.1 million barrels per day.

The US National Hurricane Center said it still considered Earl a tropical storm with maximum wind speeds of 60 knots. It said Earl was located about 50 miles west of Halifax and was moving northeast at a speed of 36 mph.

Earl had delivered heavy rain and gusty winds to parts of New England en route to Canada, but the storm stayed mostly offshore and caused far less damage than feared on its path up the US coast from North Carolina.

In Nova Scotia's provincial capital Halifax, powerful winds churned up the harbor and tossed litter through downtown streets as spectators watched on from hotel lobbies and cafes.

Earl is depositing about an inch of rain per hour in parts of the province, including the areas around Halifax and Dartmouth, across Halifax Harbour.

Imperial Oil Ltd closed its 82,000 barrel a day Dartmouth refinery before the storm struck.

The refinery is one of three in Eastern Canada, and the closest one to the center of the storm.

EnCana Corp evacuated staff from its Deep Panuke prospect off the Nova Scotia coast after suspending drilling late on Monday. The company said it would know later on Saturday when it could reopen.

Authorities closed almost all road access to Peggy's Cove, a picturesque fishing village that is one of Nova Scotia's best-known tourist destinations. The cove offers views to the Atlantic, and is a popular site for daredevil storm-watchers.

The United States had got off relatively lightly from the storm, raising hopes that the Northeast will suffer only limited losses during the three-day Labor Day holiday weekend, traditionally viewed as the final surge of summer tourist dollars for airlines and other businesses.

There were no reports of major damage on Massachusetts' Cape Cod or on the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket with winds well short of hurricane strength, maybe 50 mph.

The heaviest rain -- up to 5 inches -- was on Martha's Vineyard and on parts of mainland Cape Cod. But ferry service to the islands resumed on Saturday under sunny skies.

Storm-related outages from North Carolina to Connecticut knocked out power to about 3,300 customers, the US Energy Department said -- a small number that showed the mild impact of what had once shaped up to be a monster storm.

"We dodged a bullet here, since the storm was downgraded from a hurricane by the time it arrived," Scott MacLeod, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, said. "Other than some minor road closures due to localized flooding, we're not getting a lot of reports of major damage."

During the peak of the storm some 1,800 state residents lost power, but utility crews had already restored electricity to all but 700 of them by 6 a.m. EDT, MacLeod said.-Reuters