A post-storm investigation has concluded that last night's storm damage in Barrie's south end was consistent with a downburst.
Environment Canada says winds reached 90 to 130 km/h.
BarrieToday.com was on scene Thursday afternoon where a large tree uprooted and toppled on a parked car in a driveway on Mapleview Dr. just east of Prince William Way.
Several other large trees in the area were uprooted, fallen trees damaged power lines and a fence, and several houses suffered roo and shingle damage.
But Barrie did not get the worst of it.
"The worst damage that we're aware of up to this point in time was what happened down on the 400 in the Holland Marsh area south of Barrie," said Geoff Coulson, Environment Canada Meteorologist.
"In that area a transport truck got knocked over onto it's side. We still haven't been able to verify if the truck was loaded or not but certainly just the truck itself and the trailer being knocked over was impressive enough. And in that area as well, we also had some reports of shed damage or farm outbuilding damage done by these bursts of damaging winds."
The winds in that area were also consistent with a downburst event, according to Coulson.
"This would be a burst of damaging winds that came from the thunderstorm. The tornado situations are rapidly rotating columns of air. They tend to do damage in relatively narrow tracks. This one the damage was more widespread around the Canal Rd. area and most of the damage pushed off into one direction and that tends to make it more likely that is was a downburst as opposed to a tornado," he said.
There were reports of scattered damage from different parts of Southern Ontario from yesterday afternoon and evening's thunderstorms.
In the Bracebridge area, some trees and branches were down, fences knocked down and barbecues knocked over or shifted around.
Witnesses in Barrie described the downburst as a white wall of rain that lasted about 5 minutes.
"Ir got bad quickly and got better quickly," said Coulson. "Certainly to do the damage I'm talking about in terms of the tractor trailer and the shed damage, we would be getting winds in excess of 90 km/h to do that kind of damage."
The downburst is just the latest chapter in a very strange May weatherwise.
We came came close to breaking heat records on Wed. and Thurs.
"29.6 degrees on Wed. The record for that day at our Shanty Bay observation site was 31 degrees in 1977. Yesterday close again. The record was 30 degrees set in 2015. The Barrie area site got up to 29 degrees,' said Coulson.
He says it has been really cool for much of the month of May.
Then we had those two very hot humid days this week and then the thunderstorms to herald in the return of the cool air.
Right now it looks like were going to stay on the cool side for the rest of the month.
"Normal daytime highs for the area should be about 20 degrees and we're probably going to be a couple of degrees cooler than that. And certainly as we go through the long weekend and even the forecast into the work week next week is the mid-teens as opposed to 20-plus."
But he says at least it will get off to a nice start with sunny skies, clouds later in the day and showers Saturday night into Sunday.
Holiday Monday the sun will make another appearance.
Coulson urges people who had significant damage from the storm to share their accounts of the storm, when it happened, any pictures of the most severe damage by emailing [email protected].
