Officials from the Northern Tornadoes Project have confirmed that a tornado touched down west of Glencoe, Ont., on Thursday, causing damage along a narrow path through rural Middlesex County.
“We know it’s a tornado,” said David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University. “There’s definitely some video of the tornado actually doing the damage.”
Sills explained that the tornado formed from a rotating supercell thunderstorm that also produced large hail as it moved southeast from the Sarnia area toward London.
Investigators observed damage to several trees and at least one farm that seemed to be hit particularly hard. An RV was also flipped over in the tornado’s path.
The tornado was rated as EF0 on the EF-Scale, which classifies tornado severity from EF0 to EF5.
“So far we’re rating that damage at EF0, which is the lowest on the scale,” Sills said. “The winds with an EF0 tornado can get to 130 kilometres per hour.”
Thursday’s tornado west of Glencoe marks the fourth confirmed or preliminarily confirmed tornado in the broader London region since early May, following incidents near Lucan, south London, and near Melbourne.
A team will return for a damage survey on Friday to finalize the tornado’s rating and assess its length and maximum width. Sills mentioned that after further assessment, there might be an upgrade to an EF1 rating.
Amanda Vanderkuyl, who lives south of Glencoe, watched as the storm developed from her horse farm while keeping an eye on her 14 horses and her two young children.
“I came out to my front porch and looked up and I could see the rotation starting, which was a bit alarming,” she said.
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After realizing what she was seeing was indeed a tornado, she and her husband monitored it from different sides of their home while keeping their children safe indoors.
“It blew in like a freight train,” Vanderkuyl said. “I had rain, I had hail, I had winds.. It was a stressful 10 minutes.”
Fortunately for her property, there was only minor damage with some plants knocked over.
“My heart was pounding,” she said. “I’m happy that it stayed west of me.”
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