Just over a year ago Mark Robinson found himself driving in southeast Barrie as he followed a storm through Central Ontario.
Thursday, the professional storm hunter returned to the same area as an E-F2 tornado led him on the exact same residential streets he found himself on during the spring of 2020.
“This not the first time I’ve chased supercells in this area, specifically, literally on this street,” he said, pointing toward Coronation Parkway. “I watched the spinning storm go directly over this neighbourhood.
“It didn’t do anything, there was no tornado with it, but it could have easily produced a tornado.”
Robinson, who tracks the paths of serious storms for the Weather Network where he hosts a show called Storm Hunters, hails from Guelph, directly on the path of Ontario’s traditional tornado alley.
With the deadly 1985 Barrie tornado, another known as the Angus tornado in 2014 which also touched part of south Barrie and Thursday’s EF2 tornado that has left more than 100 people homeless with 65 homes deemed uninhabitable, it’s clear that Barrie is also in that alley.
The damage in Barrie is sobering but homes can be replaced. People can’t. @weathernetwork #ONStorm pic.twitter.com/kGTjrLvfbg
— Mark Robinson (@StormhunterTWN) July 16, 2021
Robinson explained that North America is uniquely suited to producing tremendous numbers of thunderstorms and tornadoes. The Gulf of Mexico is the fuel, the trigger is the cold air coming from the Arctic all trapped east of the Rocky Mountains.
“They’re forced to interact with each other and then you get little spin-offs that come off the lee of the Rockies, low pressure systems, and away they go,” he said.
Barrie, he said, is in a tornado track and that becomes more noticeable as the city grows and more of the local landmass is taken up by developments and neighbourhoods.
David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) based at Western University, said in Ontario, there is a geographical path these severe storms tend to follow.
“Because of the Great Lakes they kind of shape our tornado occurrence area in Southern Ontario to a kind of a corridor between Windsor and north of Toronto and into eastern Ontario,” he said. “The lakes tend to shut down convective activity over them and downwind of them, so that leaves a corridor in between them where all this activity tends to occur…. And that’s where we are.
“This is an area that’s in the tornado-prone zone and will get these kinds of events. Thankfully this one wasn’t as strong as the 85 event, catastrophic damage.”
The NTP released a list Sunday of 10 days recorded in Ontario weather history dating back to 1933 when there were three or more tornadoes. Barrie is the only city that appears twice.
The project team has determined that on Thursday, July 15 five tornadoes, all E-F2, hit the area from Barrie, east of Lake Simcoe’s Cook’s Bay toward Lindsay and north into Algonquin Park.
Sills said initially two supercell thunderstorms were spotted, one forming west of Barrie and the other south of Barrie tracking east and northeast.
The Barrie tornado Thursday measured wind speeds of up to 210 km/h on the high end of E-F2 and tracked into Innisfil where tornado experts examining the damage at Sandycove Acres determined it was an E-F1 there.
Sills and his team surveyed the tornado-struck area in Barrie Thursday evening and again on Friday, focusing first on the location that was worst hit.
The goal of the project is to better detect tornado occurrence throughout Canada and improve severe and extreme weather understanding and prediction by marrying engineering with meteorology. It also aims to mitigate harm to people and property and investigate future implications due to climate change.
The worst part in Barrie was the lower section of Sun King Crescent closest to Mapleview Drive where several houses sustained severe damage; several lost their roofs and one house collapsed.
“There are a couple of houses with a bit worse damage, but they’re kind of isolated,” said Sills. “When you’re doing these damage surveys, when you have one point of damage that seems worse than everything around it, that’s usually an outlier due to construction, or something like that.”
Early Sunday afternoon update from PWW and Majesty, where more and more work is happening on tornado affected properties. Most streets and public spaces now cleaned up and debris removed. pic.twitter.com/bw4RsChlkW
— Jeff Lehman (@Mayor_Jeff) July 18, 2021
Based on that damage, Sills and his team were able to say the wind speed was up to 210 km/h when the houses were struck.
Sills and the NTP’s wind engineer, Greg Kopp, determined that some of the roofs were lost because they were not properly fastened and they’re calling for improvements to construction, inspections as well as the building code. (For more on that click here to read the story we published yesterday).
“The failures that we’ve seen here are actually quite similar to the failures we saw in Angus in 2014, so not much has changed, apparently. Some of the failures we’re seeing are entirely preventable,” Sills said
On June 17, 2014, a large E-F2 tornado touched down in Angus, damaging homes and ripping the roofs off some houses. It travelled east, causing damage in a mobile home park and then snapped trees and power poles, landing on some homes in south Barrie, doing damage in Stroud as well.
More than 100 homes sustained damage as a result that year; up to 40 were significantly damaged.
On Thursday Robinson caught up with the storms during a downpour in Shelbourne.
“Right off the bat I could see that it had rotation; it had what we call wall cloud, which is a precursor to a potential tornado,” said the storm chaser.
His eastward tracking was interrupted by poor roads and then followed the southern storm right to Lake Simcoe and then headed straight to Barrie. He figured he arrived here about 20 minutes after the tornado came through.
