Surviving Natural Disasters

"I guarantee you, I can say this without a doubt, my husband saved my life and my son's life."
"We didn't get water inside the house, but at one point we were completely surrounded."
"I try to be positive, but it's getting harder and harder. I really feel like we're being tested. I'm a God-fearing woman but I'm confused right now."
"I have never heard my husband yell in that manner 'Get down here right now'!"
"A friend of mine was joking when she said, 'I will never live beside you'. This is following us. I said to our builder, I feel like this is my fault."
Nicole Lowden, Ottawa paramedic

Brian and Nicole Lowden’s house was destroyed by a tornado on Thomas Dolan Parkway in Dunrobin, September 23, 2018. Jean Levac / Postmedia News

"This is definitely not a short-term fix here. We're looking at weeks and months [of work to normalize the community struck by a category 3 tornado on Friday]."
"Dunrobin will bounce back and it will be rebuilt and we'll be stronger for it."
"There's a lot of heartache, but it's expressed in hope."
Greg Patacairk, president, Dunrobin Community Association

Last Friday was a really peculiar day weatherwise in Ottawa, Canada's capital city. The area, in the Ottawa Valley, is prone to freakish weather conditions, but this time the conditions were quite extraordinary. A year ago, areas of the city and across into the province next to Ontario, Quebec, there was flooding from incessant heavy spring rain. Built on Leda clay, susceptible to 'melting' when completely suffused with rain, there had been some mudslides, and the Ottawa River dividing the provinces, flooded.

Back then, the Lowden family living in the community of Constance Bay on Bayview Drive, just managed, with the help of sandbags and pumping the water out of their basement, to keep the floodwaters out of the house they had lived in for twenty years. They decided, however, to sell the house and move out of the area. Then, they planned to build a new house elsewhere in the community. Just as their old house sold, their daughter, age 21, was diagnosed with Stage 2 lymphoma. After chemotherapy treatment she is on the road to recovery.

Brian Lowden sits on an overturned boat in his backyard among debris left by the tornado that touched down in Dunrobin on Sept. 21. (Justin Tang/Canadian Press)

They have been living in a rented house in the community of Dunrobin, and disaster followed them to that location when on Friday, after a steaming, humid day of 29C with forceful winds prevailing and weather warnings of violent thunderstorms, one of those thunderstorms struck at 4:30 p.m., sending daggers of lightning from sky to ground. So much, so normal, for the Ottawa area. What was abnormal was the tornado that struck at five in the afternoon of the last day of summer. It swept through the community, ripping up trees, tumbling cars, tearing the roofs off homes and buildings.

The tornado broke hydro poles as though they were matchsticks, a quarter-of-a-million residents were without power and have been for days. And about 60 houses were completely destroyed. The Lowden family's rented house among them. Their adult son, tired after work, had arrived home to collapse on his bed upstairs. Nicole's husband Brian, a volunteer firefighter who had been on duty at a nearby fall fair, came home early in response to the severe weather warning. Nicole was upstairs closing windows against the wind and rain, when she heard her husband shout out from downstairs.

He bounded up the stairs to drag their son Daniel out of bed, and hauled her with them down the stairs to huddle in the kitchen beside the refrigerator in the basement-less house.  "I'm telling you, that's the only part of the house that is untouched", she later said. Daniel went in frantic search of their six-pound blind dog, Lola, as windows were breaking all around them, and lumber was splintering and flying through the air, and the roof flew off the house. They could look outside to see the house next door utterly gone, nothing but the foundation left.

They had no insurance on the house contents and nothing is salvageable. Escorted by firemen and other volunteers on Sunday the evacuated residents of Dunrobin were allowed to return to their homes -- what was left of them -- to look for items and keepsakes. And the Lowden family is looking for alternate rental accommodation, awaiting the completion of their new home whose construction is meant to be complete by next spring.

A firefighter hands Alex Carlson his laptop, which was recovered from the wreckage of his Dunrobin home. A volunteer firefighter for the local fire department, Carlson might have been called to the scene of his own home's destruction had he not been out of the city at the time. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)