Emergency crews scrambled to restore power and clear roads Sunday, a day after a deadly and destructive storm hit southern Ontario and Quebec.
The true death toll from Saturday’s storm is still unclear, but police say at least seven people were killed by falling trees in the high winds, while an eighth died when the boat they were in capsized in the Ottawa River near Masson-Angers, Quebec.
As of Saturday, the known victims in Ontario included a 44-year-old man who died in Greater Madawaska west of Ottawa, a woman in her 70s who was out for a walk in Brampton, a 59-year-old man on a golf course in Ottawa and a dead person in their camping trailer near Lake Pinehurst in the Waterloo region.
Provincial police on Sunday said the storm had also killed a 64-year-old woman at a home in North Kawartha Township and a 74-year-old woman in Port Hope, while Durham Regional Police said a man from 30 years old man had died in Ganaraska Forest east of Toronto.
Widespread damage from the storm has prompted the Ontario cities of Uxbridge, north of Toronto, and Clarence-Rockland, east of Ottawa, to declare states of emergency, while hundreds of thousands in both provinces remain without power.
“We have numerous buildings damaged and people displaced,” Uxbridge Mayor Dave Barton said.
The downtown area suffered significant damage, including several residential buildings and a brewery, while the city is still experiencing significant power outages, Barton said.
“The biggest pressure is actually the lack of power and infrastructure. At the moment, we don’t know what we don’t know. Because most phone lines are down, we don’t know who needs assistance and who doesn’t. ”
Hydropower providers say they have hundreds of crews working to restore services, but warn some could take days to get power back.
“Between trees, branches, broken poles and downed wires, it’s really a very, very messy cleanup,” said Hydro One spokeswoman Tiziana Baccega Rosa.
She said that while it is not unusual to have such a high number of people temporarily without power, which for Hydro One was around 260,000 on Sunday afternoon, the extent of the damage, including the toppling of metal transmission towers in the Ottawa area, is notable.
“That’s unique, and it tells you the severity of the storm,” he said.
Hydro Ottawa said the damage, which includes more than 200 downed power poles across the city, is far more widespread than a 2018 tornado that left half the city without power, meaning it will take longer and be more difficult to repair. As of Sunday afternoon there were still about 175,000 customers without power.
Across the city, repairs were being made to roofs and chainsaws were buzzing as the cleanup continued. The city of Ottawa has opened at least three community center emergency centers for people to charge their devices, shower and, in some cases, access some food.
East of Ottawa in Navan, Ontario, a mare and her newborn foal were trapped, though uninjured, when a barn collapsed around them. In nearby Sarsfield, the bell tower of the Paroisse Saint-Hugues church was thrown from the building and left destroyed in the car park.
Across the provincial border, Hydro-Québec said that at its peak the storm cut power to 550,000 customers from Gatineau to Québec City, while as of Sunday afternoon about 350,000 customers were still out.
Sophie Desjardins, who lives in Lachute, northwest of Montreal, posted a photo of what was left of her truck after a tree crashed into the vehicle while she was driving home with her boyfriend.
“The sky got so dark and the wind was so strong,” Desjardins said Sunday.
“We felt a huge impact and the window shattered… When we saw the condition of the truck, we realized we had been very lucky. If the tree had fallen two seconds earlier, it would have fallen directly on us… The furniture that were in the back of the truck were completely destroyed.”
The level of damage in the two provinces was due in part to the nature of the storm, which appears to have been what is called a right, Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Gerald Cheng said.
“When they say right, they are long-lasting, widespread windstorms that are associated with fast-moving thunderstorms, and that seems to be what we had yesterday,” he said. “Because when you look at the damage, it was very widespread, it wasn’t just a hint.”
The storm, with measured winds of up to 132 kilometers per hour, was severe enough to trigger the agency’s first use of the broadcast outage weather warning system for a thunderstorm, Cheng said.
However, wind speeds could have reached a much higher level based on some of the concentrated damage, said David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornado Project at Western University.
“We’re seeing evidence of some damage, like collapsed roofs and collapsed hydroelectric pylons, those kinds of things that get into more at… 180 to 220 kilometers per hour.”
He said project teams have gone to the Uxbridge area, as well as south of Ottawa on suspicion they might have been hit by tornadoes or high winds.
The last right-hand storm to hit the region with such strong wind speeds was in 1995, Sills said.
“This is a pretty rare event in Canada where it’s just widespread wind damage on a very long runway and getting pretty high wind speeds.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on May 22, 2022.
— With files from Virginie Ann in Montreal.
Ian Bickis and Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press
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