First of all, where did 2021, go? Am I right?
But regardless of how quickly it passed, 2021 still used each of its 365 days to the max. So much happened.
But if I only have a few hundreds words to recap, I will do so with the most important day of the past year for many Barrie residents, including myself — July 15, 2021.
A phone call from his dad most likely saved my son’s life.
On the afternoon of July 15, I dropped by my ex’s home on Sun King Crescent to see my 16-year-old son, Adam, and our dogs. It was a typical, every-other-day event.
When I rang the doorbell, Adam came down from his room on the second floor to let me in. After saying a quick hello to our dogs, the phone rang. Adam, a typical teenager, doesn’t normally answer the phone, but because he was already in the kitchen standing right beside it, he reached over and said “hello.”
It was his dad, Jon. He was at Costco, a little over six kilometres away, and was concerned a storm was brewing because he had just witnessed a garbage can fly across the parking lot and break someone’s windshield.
He told Adam to take the dogs to the basement to be safe.
Adam hung up and told me, so we grabbed a blanket and the dogs and reluctantly went into the basement. This definitely spared us from injury and possibly death, as we had no idea that a tornado was approaching the house at speeds of 210 kilometres per hour.
Once in the basement, I opened up Twitter to see if the recent thunderstorm warning had been upgraded, but I didn’t get far, as a noise approaching the house got our attention.
Adam was sitting on the lowest basement stair and I was sitting on the floor when he said “that sounds like a tornado.”
A loud roar of wind, like an airplane that loses cabin pressure, combined with the sound of things breaking and falling, and the rattling of the house made it impossible for Adam and I to hear each other for the next seven to 10 seconds without yelling as loud as we could.
Dust started to fall on our heads so we picked up the dogs and Adam pushed all of us into a corner of the basement.
My instinct was to go and look at what was happening, but when I motioned to go upstairs, Adam grabbed my face, turned it towards his and yelled, “You’re not going upstairs!"
I yelled back “I know!” and we stood there until it stopped. Was it going to stop?
I remember the feeling of the split second when I wasn’t sure.
When we knew it had passed, I ran up the stairs to find the basement door jammed. I pushed it open and turned the video on my phone on. I had no idea what I was about to see and I wanted to let Jon know what happened to his home as soon as possible.
I told Adam to stay in the basement with the dogs and proceeded to walk upstairs in a home that now had no roof. It was raining in
the house and tarps from the roofing were blowing in the wind where the roof used to be.
The back of the house was severely damaged and debris was all over the living room and kitchen — where the dogs would have been if Jon didn’t call.
I fumbled to find my shoes at the front door under glass and debris that included items from a neighbour’s home. I finally found Adam’s shoes and put them on, later realizing they were full of glass.
I opened the front door with my video still on. It didn’t feel real. It was like I was on an apocalyptic movie set. Pink and white insulation was still falling from the sky. The tornado had knocked Jon’s neighbour’s house over onto his. It used to be a two-storey home and now it was a bungalow. I had no idea if they were home, and no way to check because the house was just a pile of bricks now.
My Jeep was about 20 metres down the road from where I had originally parked it, with the windows smashed and several tires burst. A car was on its roof across the road in a driveway.
Most of the homes in front of my eyes had severe damage; missing roofs, broken windows, bricks and wood all over driveways and the road. Stuff everywhere.
I ran back inside to check on Adam and the dogs and called 911.
When I went back outside, neighbours started to fill the streets. An off-duty firefighter was trying to find a way into the house that had collapsed and other neighbours went door to door trying to check on people possibly still inside their homes. You didn’t need to open the front door to yell inside; most had no windows left.
At one point, I heard one of Adam and Jon’s neighbours, who I am guessing is 10 years old, yell up to me while I was on a neighbour’s porch that “no one was home.” I turned around to look at him.
My eyes welled up just as a Barrie police officer ran up to the house past me. This poor kid is experiencing this with all of us, I thought, 'What will this do to our children?'
Somehow, no one died. An EF-2 tornado destroyed many homes and property. Jon’s home was one that needed to be completely demolished prior to being rebuilt. His roof and the back of the upper floor were ripped off by the tornado.
In fact, the experts from the Institute of Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) who came to examine homes after the tornado could never find his roof.
Adam’s room, where he would have been had I not visited at that time and had Jon not called to tell him to go in the basement, was a pile of debris. No roof, windows smashed near his desk, drywall falling and all of his belongings now soaked with rain, wet insulation and dust.
I bawled for days thinking about what could have happened.
The community had a massive cleanup to undertake. Where would we even begin?
Well, there was no need to wonder, because within hours of the tornado, donations of food, clothing, pet food, etc., were being dropped off at a nearby school. Volunteers from far and wide came to help clean up.
Emergency services from other areas came to support those with injuries.
Companies donated supplies and hands-on help.
The City of Barrie very quickly showed the world how it will recover, and be better off for it in the end.
I am working with Barrie MPPs Andrea Khanjin and Doing Downey and the ICLR to have the Ontario Building Code updated to include that municipalities where tornadoes are known to — or likely to — hit make it mandatory for builders to include hurricane straps. This will help to keep a home’s roof on in tornadoes of EF-0 to EF-2 strength, the most common strengths of tornadoes in Ontario. This is a massive undertaking, but so worth the fight.
My son would have likely died the day of the tornado had he not been in the basement. How can I not use this immense blessing to make our homes better when a tornado hits again.
We can’t ignore the data; our climate is changing so quickly. We must do all we can to educate families on how to keep their homes as safe as possible and to mandate measures which are proven to work. For more information on this, please visit iclr.org.
To everyone who helped and continues to help with the effects of the tornado, thank you. We see you. We appreciate you.
And if you were directly impacted by the tornado and would like to join an online peer support group, please search “Barrie Peer Support” on Facebook and simply ask to join.
Coun. Natalie Harris represents Ward 6 in Barrie.
