Environment Canada confirms ‘at least one’ tornado touched down in southern Ontario Sunday

Environment Canada has confirmed that a tornado touched down in southern Ontario Sunday as a powerful storm system moved through the region.

In a statement late Monday, the agency said investigators have determined that a tornado – likely an EF1 – touched down in the Marmora - Madoc - Actinolite area, roughly 60 kilometres east of Peterborough.

“There was a long track of damage due to at least one tornado and downburst winds,” the agency said. “Damage has been preliminarily rated as high end EF-1 with peak wind speeds of near 175 km/h. The final track length and strength of the winds associated are not yet determined.”

Staff from Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project and Environment and Climate Change Canada began investigating the damage Monday after the storms swept through Sunday night.

The damage discovered so far includes homes with roofs which have been partially removed, barns that have been completely destroyed, downed tree branches and blown-over hydro poles.

Speaking with CP24 earlier in the day, one meteorologist said the storm had an unusually long track.

“It is quite possible we could have had one or two tornadoes, maybe more, this was a particularly long lived rotating thunderstorm that we call a super cell thunderstorm and when you look at the map and the length of time this was a rotating storm, the total distance is an incredible 140 to 150 kilometres from initial reports in the Madoc and Tweed areas all the way to areas northwest of Brockville,” Meteorologist Geoff Coulson told CP24. “It is quite an extensive area of potential damage for the surveyors to look at.”

Coulson said that Sunday night’s active weather in that area began at around 7:45 p.m. and lasted until 9 p.m. Storms hit some other parts of the province hours later.

Environment Canada said that there were widespread reports of damage following the storms, including reports of a flipped trailer in Rockdale, downed trees and hydro wires in Tweed and Madoc and numerous homes damaged in Marmora.

In the wake of the damage, the municipality of Tweed has formally declared a state of emergency.

“We are looking at a very long track of damage and that is why we think four teams is going to be needed to get a true sense of how significant this particular event was,” Coulson said.

The storm also knocked out power to around 26,000 Hydro customers across the province, according to Hydro One.

Crews worked non-stop to try bring customers back online, but the utility said Monday that some people might still be without power for a second night

“Hydro One crews have been working tirelessly to assess and safely restore power to as many customers as possible after severe thunderstorms rolled through the province on Sunday,” Hydro One said on its website. “While crews continue restoration efforts, we anticipate some customers in the hardest hit areas of Brockville and Tweed will be without power overnight.”

Havelock, Marmora, Madoc and Tweed, which are all east of Peterborough and north of Belleville, were hit hard by the severe weather.

Toronto Hydro was not reporting any major outages as of Monday night.

On Sunday night, Environment Canada issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Toronto and much of the Greater Toronto Area. The national weather agency said the GTA could see between 50 and 75 millimetres of rainfall and wind gusts of up to 70 km/h.

All alerts ended for the GTA shortly before 11 p.m.

The strong storms, which included bursts of lightning and intense rainfall at times, followed days of intense heat and humidity across southern Ontario.