An investigation is now underway to determine if a tornado may have touched down east of Peterborough on Sunday night.
Environment Canada says two of its crews, as well as two from Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project, will survey an area today from Malmora in the west to Brockville in the east as they work to determine whether an “area extensive damage” could have been caused by a tornado.
“It’s very possible that we would have had one or two tornadoes, maybe more, this was a particularly long rotating storm that we call a super cell storm and when you look at the map and the time that it was a rotating storm, the total distance is incredible of between 140 and 150 kilometers from initial reports in the Madoc and Tweed areas to areas northwest of Brockville,” meteorologist Geoff Coulson told CP24. “It’s a pretty large area of potential damage for surveyors.”
Coulson said Sunday night’s active weather started around 7:45 p.m. and lasted until 9 p.m.
Environment Canada says there were widespread reports of damage after the storms, including reports of an overturned trailer in Rockdale, downed trees and water lines in Tweed and Madoc and numerous damaged homes in Marmora.
Following the damage, Tweed Township has formally declared a state of emergency.
“We’re looking at a very long damage trail and so we think it’s going to take four teams to get a real sense of how significant this particular event was,” Coulson said.
Hydro One said the bad weather at one point saw more than 26,000 customers left in the dark.
Toronto Hydro is currently reporting a note outage affecting up to 500 customers in the South Cedarbrae area of Scarborough, north of Eglinton Avenue East and east of Bellamy Road North.
There are also some minor localized outages in the city affecting up to 100 customers.
There are also some mostly smaller outages in communities across southern Ontario.
Havelock, Marmora, Madoc and Tweed, which are east of Peterborough and north of Belleville, were hit hard by the bad weather. Several thousand people in these areas are still without electricity.
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 millimeters of rain and wind gusts of up to 70 km/h.
All alerts ended for the GTA shortly before 11:00 p.m
The severe storms, which included lightning flashes and heavy rain at times, followed days of intense heat and humidity in southern Ontario.