An investigation is underway to determine if a tornado may have touched down east of Peterborough on Sunday evening.
Environment Canada says two of its teams, as well as two teams from Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project, will survey an area spanning from Malmora in the west to Brockville in the east today as they work to determine whether there may be “an extensive area of damage’ was caused by a tornado.
“It’s entirely possible that we had one or two tornadoes, maybe more, this was a particularly long-lasting rotating thunderstorm that we call a supercell thunderstorm and when you look at the map and the length of time that this was a rotating storm, the total distance is an incredible 140 to 150 kilometers from the initial reports in the Maddock and Tweed areas all the way to areas northwest of Brockville,” meteorologist Jeff Coulson told CP24. “It’s a pretty extensive area of potential damage that surveyors need to look at.”
Storm damage around the town of Actinolith is seen from CTV News Toronto’s helicopter.
Coulson said Sunday night’s active weather began around 7:45 p.m. and lasted until 9 p.m.
Environment Canada says there were widespread reports of damage after the storms, including reports of an overturned trailer in Rockdale, downed trees and hydro mains in Tweed and Madoc and multiple homes damaged in Marmora.
As a result of the damage, the municipality of Tweed has officially declared a state of emergency.
“We’re looking at a very long trail of damage and so we think it’s going to take four teams to really get a sense of how significant this particular event is,” Coulson said.
The storm passed through southern Ontario on Sunday night. (CTV News Toronto)
Hydro One said the bad weather at one point left more than 26,000 customers in the dark.
Toronto Hydro is currently reporting one outage affecting up to 500 customers in the South Cedarbrae area of Scarborough, north of Eglinton Avenue East and east of Bellamy Road North.
There are also several minor localized outages in the city affecting up to 100 customers.
There are also some mostly smaller outages in communities across southern Ontario.
Havelock, Marmora, Maddock and Tweed, which are east of Peterborough and north of Belleville, were badly hit by the severe weather. Several thousand people in these areas are still without power.
On Sunday evening, Environment Canada issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Toronto and much of the Toronto area. The National Weather Service said the GTA could see between 50 and 75 millimeters of rain and wind gusts of up to 70 km/h.
All alerts ended for GTA just before 11pm
The severe storms, which included flashes of lightning and heavy rainfall at times, followed days of intense heat and humidity in southern Ontario.
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