Residents of southeastern Newfoundland were prepared for the worst, but Hurricane Maria appears to have done little damage to the island, with no power outages.

"They just met a girl named Maria here in Newfoundland and they're not terribly impressed," CTV's Todd Battis reported from St. John's.

"It turned out not to be the event everyone was expecting, and that's a good thing."

A hurricane watch was in effect for the southern part of the Avalon Peninsula, where winds were expected to whip along open spaces with speeds of up to 140 kilometres per hour.

"In our bulletins … we discussed the possibility of some trees being blown down, large branches and utilities lines coming down," Chris Fogarty of the Canadian Hurricane Centre had told a news conference earlier in the day.

Dennis O'Keefe, the mayor of St. John's, said the city was prepared "as we humanly can be."

But instead, Maria was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.

St. John's is located in the northern part of the Avalon Peninsula, where Environment Canada issued rainfall, wind and tropical storm warnings on Friday.

Maria is expected to merge with a intense low pressure system east of Labrador. The combination of the two systems will create strong winds that will be felt throughout the entire province through Saturday.

With files from The Canadian Press