A strong wind and thunderstorm hit southwestern Ontario on Wednesday, causing heavy damage.
Thursday, a team from Northern Tornado Project Western University in London, Ont., was dispatched to investigate the damage and determine whether a tornado had hit the ground.
The project’s executive director, Dave Sills, said the damage and transfer of data is complicated.
“We’re trying to put it all together, trying to figure out what really happened,” Sills said.
“One of the Reports” [on social media] Those people who were right in the middle of that storm. At the same time, we have received reports of damage to the South [Plympton-Wyoming, Ont.]And this is where the most damage has happened,” he said.
He described the damage as “low-end EF1” with Enhanced Fujita or tornado damage on the EF scale.
“We had several barns and outdoor buildings that were damaged or destroyed, some homes with shingle damage, trees were uprooted and broken.”
Sills said it takes a while to connect the dots and determine whether damage was caused by the tornado.
“Someone said they saw a tornado, in fact it was almost like a tornado, and they weren’t sure it was actually doing any damage at ground level. But we know there was damage in the vicinity. We could see on the radar that this big gust of wind was to the south. Some of these events are very complicated and we collect as much data as we can.”
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From here, Sills said the next step is to look at high-resolution satellite imagery. He said this can help in getting a bigger picture of the area. Having said that researchers can help understand this more with data collected from the ground.
A tornado siren could be heard at Western University on Wednesday, alerting residents of the area. But there are some things that go off in the siren alarm.
“A tornado watch was issued earlier. And that’s because the conditions were looking too good for a line of tornadoes to arrive. Once they started crossing the lake and into our area, that’s on the radar. There were areas to turn around. It prompted tornado warnings and that’s great because you want people to have time before the tornado hits.”
Fortunately, there was a missing ingredient in the recipe for a tornado.
“There was an upper low pressure system that came in from Alberta and slowly moved to us. It just started to lose a little bit of oomph — the upward mobility we call it — things that would have actually caused the storm to have a strong updraft.” and then generates tornadoes. As soon as it hit our area, it started weakening.”
Chris Godwin was in Theford area when the storm struck.
“I came upon the storm between Iperwash and Highland Glen,” Godwin said.
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Chris Godwin
“At the time, I was only dealing with 50-60 km/h winds. I went up about half a mile and put myself directly in the path of the storm. I was injured in the middle and my visibility at one point There was zero and the winds easily exceeded 100 km/h.”
Godwin said he waited about 10 minutes for the storm to pass. When he continued to drive, he suffered significant damage.
“Large trees were broken in half and several barns were damaged, some smaller ones destroyed,” he said. “There was also a lot of damage to the crop.”
The Northern Tornado Project team will continue to investigate to determine if any tornadoes touched off.
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