UPDATE July 15: The Northern Tornadoes Project posted on Twitter that a “downburst *appears* to be the cause but thorough analysis of the drone data is needed before classification / rating.”
Jan Sirek will never question his wife Elizabeth’s intuition again.
While volunteering at Huntsville’s COVID-19 vaccine clinic late yesterday afternoon, Elizabeth learned of a tornado watch for the area. Her daughter-in-law, Danielle, and grandchildren were at the Sirek home on Tasso Lake, so Elizabeth alerted them before calling Jan at work to suggest he head home so that they wouldn’t be alone.
It proved to be a wise idea.
When Jan arrived, he began preparing for high winds, tidying up the dock and covering the pontoon boat. At first, there was just increasingly heavy rain and “reasonable wind but no more different than a normal storm,” he recalled. But as the intensity increased, he and Danielle decided they’d better head for the basement where Danielle’s children and the dogs already were.
He remembers having a brief discussion about a wind chime hanging from the porch. Perhaps it should be brought in so it didn’t get damaged, suggested Danielle, but Jan figured it would be fine, being built for the wind after all. Moments later, just after they returned inside, the winds hit hard.
“I was standing facing the back windows and it was just…I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like the trees and everything were just coming toward us,” recalled Danielle. “We both ran for the basement, and while we were on the stairs heading down there was this tremendous sound, I guess from all the trees cracking and hitting the roof.”
It happened extremely fast, she added, in what felt like a matter of seconds. And when they came out a few minutes later to survey the damage, “I was stunned,” said Danielle. They could see two large trees that had come down onto the house through the windows. “It’s not really setting in until this morning, the scope of the damage.”
Nor did the realization of what could have happened. Shortly after they returned upstairs, Danielle heard a noise outside and Jan went out to investigate. One of the downed trees had hit the home’s propane regulator and broke the pipe off. “So we had raw gas spewing,” said Jan. Fortunately, as owner of Tasso Lake Heating, he had the tools and knowledge to quickly shut off the gas, and had the parts to repair the leak and turn the gas back on so their generator could run.
The roof of their home, which was just redone last year, likely has structural damage. Inside, the ceiling in their bedroom suite has buckled and the drywall is cracked. Several windows at the front of the house are cracked as well.
Another large pine barely missed a Tasso Lake Heating work van that was parked just out front, and now blocks access to the front door. Jan estimates that about 30 large trees came down, and equally as many on his brother’s property next door. Where there was once dense forest, sunshine now streams through.
In the strange chaos typical of wind storms, some items were heavily damaged while others were completely unscathed.
A canvas gazebo behind the house was mangled, and a glass-topped table was hurled several dozen feet where it shattered near the home. Their dock is “wrecked,” said Jan, but their boats are fine. A tin boat at waters’ edge was flipped over onto shore. The kayaks and paddleboats nearby were untouched. At a neighbours’ property, their boat ended up ten feet up their stairs.
Several adjacent properties had many downed trees. One had damage to their sun porch and a cottage just across the bay had two trees on its roof, but surprisingly few buildings sustained damage, noted Jan.
There’s a large hemlock on Jan’s brother’s property next door, which was already dying when Jan was a child. His father had filled all of the holes made by woodpeckers with “probably fifty, a hundred pounds of concrete…it has survived so many storms.” But not this one.
Hydro crews were out in force this morning, working to repair downed hydro poles and restore power.
A steady stream of neighbours have been stopping by, armed with tarps and chainsaws, ready to help but the situation is still dangerous, with partially fallen trees threatening to crash to the ground.
“We have a whole army of friends who are volunteering to come over and help,” said Jan.
Lake of Bays Councillor Rick Brooks was among those who came by to survey the damage in the area, and to see if he could do anything. He recalled the tornado that touched down in 2017, seven or eight kilometres to the west. “When the tornado went through on Swains Bay, everybody was able to pitch in to help,” he said. This time, with so many workers already in the area and so many unsafe trees to be dealt with, there’s not much that neighbours can do yet.
The Sireks are grateful everyone is safe and uninjured. The loss of so many trees will take some getting used to, however. Jan grew up on the lake: his parents bought what is now his brother’s cottage in 1962 and his aunt and uncle built the cottage at the property where Jan and Elizabeth now live in 1948. “The hardest part of this whole experience is the seclusion, the privacy of these properties is just gone,” he said.
It’s not known yet whether the damage was caused by a tornado or another wind event like a downburst.
Steven Flisfeder, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said that a team from the University of Western Ontario’s Northern Tornadoes Project will be out to assess the damage later today, after they’re done investigating reports of another tornado near Penetanguishene.
The team assesses the type and severity of damage and compares it to the Enhanced Fujita (EF) Scale, which rates the intensity of wind damage from from zero (weakest) to five (strongest). According to the ECCC website, the EF Scale uses 31 damage indicators and a wind speed scale that ranges from 90 km/h (low end of EF0) to more than 315 km/h (high end of EF5) to assign a rating. Environment and Climate Change Canada began using the EF Scale, which replaced the earlier Fujita Scale, in 2013.
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