Correction: The house pictured in the main image was originally said to belong to Terry Young but is the house of Justin Young who had taken shelter in the basement during the tornado.
Many in the area are dealing with the aftermath of yesterday’s storm and what residents say was a tornado that went through the Birds Creek area.
We first heard about the storm shortly after it happened from resident Dan Wilson.
“One minute it was nice and sunny, next minute it started to rain and then it got a little worse and then all of a sudden it was, wow, I can’t see the neighbour’s house anymore.”
This morning, we spoke with Dorothy Young and her husband, Carman, who was out cleaning up the yard.
“I’ve never seen rain like that in my life and I’m 86 years old,” said Carman.
We also spoke with their son, Terry Young, who said trees had been flattened at the nearby property of his nephew Justin Young, where a large pine tree had come down of the roof of the garage.
We asked Young what he knew about the path of damage.
“It came down off Baptist Lake and down the Ray Road and across the Ray Road and across the High Falls Road. And then it came down in the Leveque subdivision here. And then I think it headed right across to Musclow-Greenview. So it kind of came from the west to the east.”
Young said his friend Glen Malloy had seen the funnel cloud in the Ray Road area, so we headed a bit further south to where Glen Malloy lives to hear more about his experience.
Malloy:
“Something was up when I heard sounds like a freight train coming through the bush for about 10 minutes. Then it hit the top of the hill, jumped right here and then took out that tree on the house. And then [it went] straight down the driveway, right towards the river… it was swirling… a funnel.”
Malloy said he had been upstairs at the time.
“And I just come down and then I saw it out the door.”
Malloy had a tree come down on part of his roof and was out cleaning it up this morning.
The Moose’s own Joel and Tracy Lamoureux were also in the path of the storm.
“It happened very fast” said Joel, “and it sounded like a locomotive was falling from the sky and landing in our house…loud, ground rumbling, house shaking…scary”
We spoke with Jorin Eastman from the Hydro One crew, who was out working by Highway 62 and Buck Hill Road, where a large swath of trees had been flattened.
He said crews had been out across the region making sure there was no fire hazard.
“It’s work we gotta do before we could pick [these people] up. But we were out all the way up to Lake St. Peter, Mink Lake Road, just making sure stuff wasn’t burning.”
When trees come down on power lines, Hydro crews need to fix those first and make sure there is no imminent danger to the public from live wires before the heavy lifting of clean-up can begin.
Hydro now estimates power will be back on by 11 p.m. tonight.
Birds Creek Public School was closed today because of the power outage, and another Hydro crew was on site cleaning up trees that had come down on the edge of the elementary school playground.
Aftermath of the storm photos courtesy of Joel Lamoureux
