The July 15 tornado in south-end Barrie both rattled and rallied the city in what was the biggest local news story of the year.
Miraculously, no one was killed when the twister touched down that afternoon. And although Barrie is a commuter town where residents may be known to keep to themselves, the tornado also showed another side as people sprang into action to help one another. There even came a time early on after the disaster where city officials had to tell people to stop bringing donations. That speaks volumes and is a testament to the city's generosity in times of need.
Tornadic weather is nothing new to people who live in this part of central Ontario. We get severe storm warnings regularly in the summer and although it doesn't always result in a tornado, we often see the spooky brew whipped up in the sky that can lead to one.
I think it's safe to say that day was different than what we have been accustomed to. It didn't have that eerie orange or green sky in the lead-up to the storm. There was heavy rain and lightning, followed by that unusual and sudden cool breeze.
“It wasn’t ominous. It didn’t scare the beegeebies out of me when I looked at that sky,” Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) senior climatologist David Phillips, who lives in Barrie’s downtown, told BarrieToday at the time.
“I didn’t think necessarily to tornadoes because I didn’t think the sky was angry enough," he added. "So I think that sometimes people maybe could have been caught off guard.”
Just after 2:30 p.m., July 15, the tornado tracked from the miniature golf course on Huronia Road and Mapleview Drive and continued east toward Prince William Way, where it caused significant damage on the north side of Mapleview, and then went beyond the Prince William Way subdivision, according to the ECCC. It had a damage track approximately 12 kilometres long and a maximum path width of 600 metres.
Like any major event, people will always remember where they were and what they were doing at the time. I was off on vacation that week and had been swimming with my kids at The Gables on Hurst Drive, just a few minutes away from from there the tornado would soon touch down. As the storm rolled in, we scurried out of there pretty damn quick and just as the lightning was starting. Like Phillips, I wasn't thinking tornado, either.
As we arrived back at the house, my wife — who had been working from home — told me a tornado may have struck the city's south end. I called reporter Shawn Gibson to see if he had heard anything similar and he proceeded to head to the area. It quickly became evident that something terrible had happened around Prince William Way and Mapleview Drive East.
For Gibson, it was his first time covering an incident of that magnitude.
"I saw damage in pockets of Prince William Way and when I turned the corner on to Majesty Boulevard, one of the heavier hit areas, it took my breath away for a second," he says. "Houses were off their foundations, roofs were either gone or shifted, cars were flipped over and people were still wandering around after surveying the damage as the tornado had hit just minutes before.
"As someone who was there to report what was happening, I had to shake off the shock of what I was seeing," Gibson says.
While we didn't immediately know if it was a tornado, the devastation was crystal clear. Trees blocked passage into the neighbourhood, some homes had lost their roofs and dazed residents walked the streets trying to help anyone they could.
Kevin Lamb, a freelance photojournalist for BarrieToday who lives in the neighbourhood, was one of the first people to chronicle as much of the destruction as he could in the immediate aftermath.
"Strangely enough, there wasn't much in the way of wind at the time, just some steady rain," says Lamb, who quickly grabbed his camera gear and headed out.
A few blocks away, he found himself at ground zero.
"It was quite shocking, the amount of damaged in such a small, localized area," Lamb says. "You hear about it on the news when tornadoes strike, but to see it up close is hard to describe. Houses completely levelled, but just two or three homes away from the path of it there is little damage other than a few shingles gone or a broken window. Small bits of grey blown-in insulation from people's attics was everywhere. It caked every surface, on houses, cars, and the ground. Debris was scattered about the streets, beds, washing machines, barbecues, sinks."
Seeing several vehicles flipped over in driveways and on the street "brought home the sheer power of wind," the photographer says, not to mention several two-storey homes that had been reduced to a single storey.
"It was jaw-dropping to see the extent of it," says Lamb, adding he was "struck by the stillness" in the moment.
"When I arrived at Sun King Crescent, where the damage was most extreme, it was very quiet. Rain was still falling, but outside of a few sirens from police cars, everything was quiet," he says. "There were people milling about at the ends of their driveways and a few people rushing to other houses to check on people, but not much was being said.
"Everyone was clearly in a state of shock. Adults, children standing around not knowing what to do next. Even the animals were quiet. There was a puppy in a metal crate on a driveway with no one around, just sitting and watching people go by. It was the same thing with a parrot in its cage waiting on the street where their owner had left it."
In our virtual newsroom at BarrieToday, we knew getting into the disaster zone would be very difficult if not impossible in the coming minutes and hours. And we were right. But we still had stories to tell and reporting to do.
Reporter Bob Bruton began working the phones from his home in central Barrie, already aware that something very serious had happened in our city.
“I knew it was bad when I heard the sirens. Not one or two blaring, even three, but way too many to count — from fire engines, police cruisers and ambulances," Bruton says. "When one drove out of hearing range, another took its place. I thought what bad luck Barrie has, to have two bad storms in one week. On Tuesday, two days before, as much as 60 millimetres of rain fell across the city in about 90 minutes. But the July 15 tornado was obviously much worse.”
In Barrie's north end, well away from the path of the tornado, the rain that fell on July 15 was remarkable, says reporter Marg. Bruineman.
"Buckets filled with water within minutes and it was immediately clear this wasn't an ordinary storm," she says.
Wind damage became evident approaching the affected southeast Barrie neighbourhood, with branches and trees broken and shingles loosened, Bruineman adds.
"Walking past Saint Gabriel the Archangel Catholic School and turning onto Coronation Parkway and Monarchy Street revealed disarray — material like insulation from houses was strewn about. I was struck by crumpled trampolines resting in front yards, one was even perched on a roof," she says. "A young man pointed at the space between the houses revealing a home behind his — its roof was gone and it became clear at that moment that many more houses weren't able to weather that massive storm.
"But while sections of Majesty Boulevard had sustained severe damage, others seemed to have very little. And the damage on Sun King Crescent worsened as it winds closer to Mapleview Drive. A corner house seemed totally out of place in the neighbourhood. It had just one storey and sat on an angle. We later learned that the entire first floor had collapsed," says Bruineman.
After I dropped my kids off at home, I grabbed my gear and tried to head to the area. Regional editor Dave Dawson was handling the posting of information from his office in Orillia.
Getting into the tornado zone at that point was not happening, but I saw on my phone that Barrie police had scheduled an impromptu news conference at nearby St. Peter's high school on Yonge Street to update reporters on what had transpired.
That was as close as I would get to the scene until later that evening when I covered another press conference involving several city and emergency services officials at the water treatment plant on Royal Parkside Drive. It was there we learned that somehow no one had been killed in the storm. While there were injuries, some of which were serious, there were no fatalities. The storm injured 10 people, but all were soon released from hospital. Most of the injuries were "trauma-related."
"We are so fortunate to be standing here tonight not talking about the loss of life," Mayor Jeff Lehman said at the evening news conference. "I can't tell you how incredible it is that nobody has been killed. This certainly could have been a much more serious disaster."
Dozens of homes were damaged, some losing their roofs. It also raised questions about home construction in Barrie, which is located at the top end of so-called Tornado Alley.
Reporter Nikki Cole was working away on a few other stories near the city's north end on what had otherwise been "a pretty uneventful day." That was until alerts began popping up on her phone through the Weather Network app.
"I honestly didn't think much of it. Even when I was chatting with a friend who lives near Little and Yonge and she mentioned hearing sirens, I still didn't really think much beyond 'Oh, I should send a message to so and so to see what that was'," says Cole, adding they had been planning to go to Newmarket to look for some Harry Potter stuff for her daughter.
Those plans were quickly dashed after Cole saw video footage on Facebook from city councillor Natalie Harris, who had been in the tornado zone and had taken shelter with her son in the home's basement. The roof was ripped off the house.
"I was definitely in shock and after learning that two of my (reporter) colleagues were on their way, I started scouring social media and reaching out to anyone I could think of, including Coun. Harris who, shockingly, answered the phone amidst all the chaos," Cole says. "I was able to get her first-hand account of what she and her son had experienced.
"You could feel the adrenaline through the phone line."
Cole was tasked with finding the "human" stories within the confusion and disorder.
"My job wasn't to be our boots on the ground, but rather to try to find the humanity amongst all of the tragedy — and I found it in spades," she says. "Donations poured in from all around the city, to the point where people were actually being turned away and people who had lost everything still stepped forward to help their neighbours."
The Barrie tornado measured wind speeds of up to 210 km/h, which is on the high end of E-F2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. It tracked into Innisfil where tornado experts examining the damage at Sandycove Acres determined it was an E-F1.
The Barrie tornado was one of five to touch down that day in central Ontario from east of Lake Simcoe’s Cook’s Bay toward Lindsay and north into Algonquin Park.
Raymond Bowe is the editor at BarrieToday.
