CAPITAL REGION FATALITIES: Storm leaves trail of death and destruction in its wake

A line of violent thunderstorms brought strong winds and dumped rain across the national capital region on Saturday, killing three people and leaving a trail of widespread destruction.

The storm came from the west and hit the region with an abrupt combination of rain and wind. Clean-up continues Sunday as crews grapple with downed power lines and trees, battered neighbourhoods and increased calls for service.

Hydro Ottawa’s outage map as of 8:50 a.m. Sunday morning showed 560 outages affecting 172,265 customers, representing about half of its customer base.

Two people were critically injured at separate golf courses, as was one person in a storm-related motor vehicle accident, Pierre Poirier, chief of the Ottawa Paramedic Service, said during an emergency media conference Saturday evening.

An Ottawa Police Service spokesperson reported the death of one person in the west end, though additional details were not provided Saturday evening pending notification of next of kin.

One person died after a boat carrying two people capsized during the storm on the Ottawa River, Gatineau police said.

The Ontario Provincial Police responded to a call about a fallen tree in the Renfrew-Greater Madawaska area that resulted in the death of a 44-year-old man. The tree came down on a cottage property on Calabogie Road. The man was taken to hospital by paramedics, where he was pronounced dead.

Wind uprooted trees across the city. On Paul Anka Drive, near Hunt Club Road in the south end, it was almost more difficult to find a tree that was still firmly rooted in the ground than one that was not. A massive pine tree hit a house, shearing off part of its roof; another crushed a car.

Emergency vehicles were stretched thin across the city Saturday, so neighbours helped each other and used chainsaws to clear trees that were lying across the road.

“I was upstairs reading a book,” said Jim Carney, whose house escaped mostly unscathed. “I heard the wind and three minutes after it was done. The sun came up and my son said, ‘Dad, the trees are all down.’ I said, ’What?’”

South of Hunt Club, on Uplands Drive, hydro poles were shorn in half and metal lamp posts were bent in two, presumably from the force of the wind.

In an online post in the late afternoon Saturday, Ottawa Fire Services reported a tree down “on a patient” on Brigade Avenue between Cherry Drive and Sunnyside Drive in the Stittsville neighbourhood in the west end. Another Ottawa Fire post reported a silo collapse near Magladry Road in Navan.

Across the city, branches, water and sometimes entire trees blocked roads and slowed traffic, even on Highway 417 and Highway 174, as drivers avoided obstacles that had been blown into their paths.

Some of the tulip beds near Dow’s Lake were devastated by the wind.

In Stittsville, one of the areas that felt the full brunt of the storm, first responders blocked off a section of Main Street after power lines and trees fell across the road. Shingles lay on the street, freshly shorn from roofs, and trees, some of them two storeys high, were uprooted.

Residents cleaning debris off their lawns and sidewalks described being hit by what some of them thought was a microburst or a low-grade tornado.

“It just came on quick,” said one woman who gave her name as Bea, after the storm. “I’m a little scared of thunder and lightning, but this was, ‘holy crap.’ You don’t know what to do. Go in the basement? It was quite overwhelming.”

A generator purred at Jo-jo’s pizza Saturday evening, where people had flocked after becoming suddenly unable to cook dinner at home due to power outages.

“When (the wind) started to spin around the house, I put down our drapes so that, if anything hit the windows, it wouldn’t come through … hopefully,” Gail Stratton said. “It was definitely intense.”

Chainsaws sounded as the cleanup got underway. Hydro workers scrambled to repair damaged lines and restore power, while cellphone service was spotty in affected areas.

Strangely, though, despite tossing everything from election campaign signs to fences, the wind spared some areas and items.

“I was waiting for my plants to fly off the hooks,” Stratton said, pointing to rows of hanging plants nearby. “But they never did.”

The storm hammered the town of Perth, tearing off shingles and toppling trees and branches and blocking several streets.

Innisville was also hit hard, with trees and branches littering Highway 7. Traffic slowed in one spot just west of Innisville, where a pine tree, its top blackened by an apparent lightning strike, smouldered and sent grey smoke drifting across the highway.

Nearby, a wooden hydro pole drooped crazily, pulling the wires taut. An Ontario Provincial Police officer used the cable and winch on his SUV to drag a heavy tree trunk blocking the westbound lanes off the road. Several barns appeared to have had their roofs peeled back by the wind, while roadside billboards lay flattened on the ground.

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Stittsville Coun. Glen Gower, who was doing a walkabout on Stittsville Main Street post-storm, said the winds damaged the roofs of several buildings and broke windows in the area. City emergency services were scouting for a location to set up an emergency shelter for those who needed a place to stay, Gower said.

“It’s for folks who have damage to their homes and it’s not safe to return,” he said. “It’s still pretty early in the assessment and trying to figure out how widespread everything is and where the needs are.”

Gower had been at the Stittsville Legion for a meeting.

“All of a sudden the winds and the rains picked up and we could see limbs coming down off the trees and damage on Stittsville Main Street. We knew right away it was pretty serious,” he said.

Not far away, on Liard Street, Paul McMahon and his son Matt were clearing up the damage that occurred after the winds uprooted an enormous tree in their front hard, sending it down crushing their new Honda Civic.

“When the power went out, we all took a look outside and almost in slow motion we saw the tree fall on our car,” Matt McMahon said. “Fortunately it didn’t fall on our other car or our house, but this car didn’t fare so well.”

Weather officials had earlier warned that the storm was potentially dangerous. In a bulletin sent to cellphones at 3:58 p.m. Saturday, Environment Canada warned the population to “take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches.”

The storm front had hit Toronto and the GTA hard earlier in the afternoon, with trees blown over and dozens of power outages. Two deaths were reported in southern Ontario.

-With files from Blair Crawford