Cleanup is underway in some southwestern Ontario cities after severe weather swept across the region on Tuesday, and at least one tornado is believed to have touched down.
Environment Canada issued multiple red alert tornado warnings for areas including Brantford and the County of Brant, Simcoe-Delhi-Norfolk and Woodstock-Tillsonburg-Oxford County. The city of London was also under the warning.
“We did have tornado warnings that spanned a large region including the London area and that is where we had very significant damage reports come in,” said Monica Vaswani, warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment Canada.
The Northern Tornadoes Project, which is located in London and works with Environment Canada to confirm tornadoes, said they’re investigating reports of tornadoes and wind damage in the London area and in Huntsville, Ont.
“It looks like there was probably at least one tornado, we’re going to investigate that today,” said Dr. Dave Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project.
“The rest of the damage, we’re not quite sure yet. You know, because it’s this mix of high winds and potential tornadoes, we are dealing with all kinds of reports and trying to put it all together.”
As an investigation into potential tornadoes continues, communities like London saw heavy damage to trees and power lines.
The city itself reported approximately 300 service requests due to tree damage, though it said it does “not reflect” how many trees may have been downed, a number which is expected to be higher, according to the city’s manager of forestry operations, Kat Hodgins.
As of 12 p.m., London Hydro said about 1,800 customers remained without power. The utility company said at its height, about 6,000 customers were without.
“The hardest-hit area is East London,” a spokesperson for the utility company said in a statement. “There were multiple broken poles and lots of broken trees.”
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Work is ongoing, the city said, to assess and respond to tree damage along roads and public spaces.
Parts of Hamilton also saw outages, with more than 4,200 impacted in its Waterdown neighbourhood at its height, according to Alectra Utilities. Environment Canada confirmed the city only saw warnings for severe thunderstorms, not tornadoes.
Global News chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell said there have already been some tornadoes this year, with Alberta leading the pack.
“A lot of them have been very weak and that’s something you typically see earlier in the season,” Farnell said. “A lot of EF0s and EF1s, perhaps, but to get those stronger storms you need more dynamics, you need more heat and humidity and that — in Canada, at least — doesn’t occur until later in the season.”
The first tornado of the year occurred in Granton, Ont., on May 9 and was recorded as an EF0 with estimated maximum wind speeds of 110 km/h.
Seven more EF0s were reported between May 17 and 18 in parts of southern Alberta between Calgary and Edmonton, including Didsbury, Garfield and Olds. Wind speeds were not reported.
Farnell said tornado season typically begins around May and ramps up in June before peaking in July and early August. However, conditions vary so it’s important to stay prepared going into the season, he added.
“You need a lot of fronts and you need a lot of change to air mass,” he said. “So these warm spells followed by cool spells, oftentimes those are the cold fronts that deliver supercells and tornadoes like we saw in Ontario yesterday.”
Sills said as their investigation continues, they deal with multiple reports that they use to “put it all together,” but cautioned they’ve been encountering AI-generated images sent to them that can create more difficulty.
It’s why he urges people to be cautious before sending images.
“If their kind of Spidey senses are tingling when they see an image, don’t trust that image, it’s just likely a fake,” Sills said.
“Please don’t forward it if you think it’s a fake, right, and I know it’s nice to share with your friends, that kind of thing, but it just makes the problem worse for us trying to investigate these things.”
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