Two twisters touched down Friday evening
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Farmers in the Ottawa, Ont. area are sorting through the rubble two tornadoes left Friday evening.
An EF-3 tornado with wind speeds of up to 265 km/h swept through Kinburn, Ont., Dunrobin, Ont. and Gatineau, Que. between 4:40pm and 5:20pm Friday, Environment Canada confirmed.
Another tornado, an EF-2 with winds of up to 220 km/h, touched town in the neighbourhood of Arlington Woods in Ottawa.
The twisters caused extensive damage, and thunderstorms left hundreds of thousands of Ontarians without power.
The storm demolished two machine sheds, two silos and a barn on Jim Flewellyn’s farm. One of the sheds housed some farm equipment.
“We were going to do some renovations but there’s not much to renovate now,” he told the Ottawa Sun Saturday.
The tornado destroyed an indoor therapeutic horse riding facility in Dunrobin that was near completion.
George and Fran McLaughlin invested thousands of dollars into the arena, which took about two months to build.
“We’ll just pick up the pieces and we’ll keep going because you know, you can’t give up just because something like this happens,” Fran told CTV News Saturday.
The tornadoes’ paths appeared to be concentrated.
Farmers within 30 minutes of Dunrobin didn’t experience any damage.
“Everything in our area was alright,” Robert Clark, a cash crop producer from Carleton County, told Farms.com. “People were harvesting yesterday, so as far as I’ve seen everything here is okay.”
“We had zero damage and haven’t heard of anybody in our area experiencing anything either,” Rob Anderson, a beef and lamb producer from Ashton, Ont., told Farms.com.
Tornado damage in Dunrobin, Ont.
Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press photo