Tornado Watch

"There have been studies that have shown the well-known Tornado Alley [in the United States] that stretches from Texas to the Dakotas has been moving east, which means we might see more and more tornadoes in Canada."
"It [Ottawa's Dunrobin twister] gives us a better chance to relate the wind to the damage to the houses."
"We're trying to mitigate the tornado [damage] risk, so we are trying to better estimate losses from experimental simulations."
"In terms of the loads on the buildings, there isn't much in the building codes. We're trying to work toward that."
Jubayer Chowdhury, research scientist, adjunct research professor, Western University engineering school, London, Ontario

"[The estimated loss was $300 million] and that is probably just insured losses."
"We hope to contribute to mitigating loss that will, for sure, happen [in the future]."
Djordje Rominic, researcher, Western twister team

At Western University in London, Ontario a team of researchers is making use of the world's largest tornado simulator in an effort to more fully understand damage done by a devastating cluster of tornadoes that hit last fall in Canada's National Capital Region. As part of the Northern Tornadoes Project at the university, a team of researchers led by Jubayer Chowdhury is examining the effects of tornadoes on multiple buildings located within a neighbourhood block.

In September of 2018 six tornadoes struck the Ottawa-Gatineau (Ontario-Quebec respectively) area, destroying houses and in the process hundreds of people in communities along both sides of the boundary between the two provinces were displaced. The south-west of Ontario has experienced tornadoes in the past, in a wide zone stretching from Windsor to Eastern Ontario, prone to volcanic windstorms.

The town square in Goderich Ontario was ripped apart by a tornado in 2011. At the nearby world's largest salt mine, a worker was killed during that even. Researchers at Western's Wind EEE Dome have turned to the Ottawa tornado cluster that presents a unique opportunity to examine the consequences of those dangerous winds, in an area where few large, mature trees were growing, thus eliminating the possibility of falling or uprooted trees having contributed to the damage.

While the research details remain in the planning stages, the researchers are focusing on the strongest of the tornadoes that struck Dunrobin in the Ottawa area. That violent twister was the strongest tornado to visit Eastern Ontario since 1902. The Dunrobin twister has been identified as intense, striking a residential area. Its strength can be gauged for its standing on the six-level Enhance Fujita scale, rating tornado intensity by damage left behind.

The scale, from EFO to EF5 gave the Dunrobin tornado an EF3 value, with wind speeds of 218 to 266 kilometers an hour, in a scale range that measures as high as winds up to 320 km/h. A not-for-profit research organization, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction has funded the research through a $110,000 grant. At Western, the research team plans to simulate the tornado in their wind dome to enable the team to study its effects on homes in a scale-model block of 22 houses in Dunrobin.

The research is viewed as potentially life-saving, with findings and conclusions that might conceivably benefit insurance companies, builders and homeowners. Its conclusions and recommendations could also be used to strengthen building codes or construction standards in the interests of building structures able to withstand tornado-class winds in a highly-improved construction mode.

According to research conducted nationwide, there are about a hundred tornadoes ripping through parts of Canada annually. Moreover, this kind of research is all too timely, given that scientists have reported a notable rise in tornado activity in recent years, in particular events with multiple twisters in clusters of high-wind damage.

Northern Tornadoes Project // Special to Western News

Damage from an EF3 tornado in Dunrobin, near Ottawa, in September 2018. It was the strongest of a cluster of six tornadoes that day.

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)