Clean up efforts continued Monday following the aftermath of a severe windstorm that swept through much of the province Friday, and resulted in two tornados touching down in the Ottawa-Gatineau region.
Closer to home, as of noon Monday, Hydro One crews were still working to restore power to customers in the North Bay area.
See: High wind havoc
“In the area surrounding North Bay, there are over 507 customers that remain without power as a result of Friday’s storm. In the province, over 21,000 customers remain without power,” said Hydro One media spokesperson Tiziana Baccega Rosa.
Once the local work is complete, there is a chance those crews could be deployed to other communities.
“We want to make sure before we move resources around the province, that outages within their own area are all restored, that those customers are all back up, and then we make the decisions on where to send crews, if there is still other active outages in the province.”
In North Bay, some residents were left to deal with damage to their private property, but damage to city property was minimal.
Parks manager David Schroeder said city crews found some large trees uprooted and branches down along parts of the waterfront, but overall it was not as bad as anticipated.
“We were surprised that we were relatively unscathed by the storm, we actually didn’t have a lot of damage. We had about a half dozen trees down throughout the city, and a lot of branches down,” said Schroeder.
“There was some minor damage out on King’s Landing where some boards got snapped by the wind. Damage that was a little more significant, happened at the Tweedsmuir tennis courts. One of the light poles blew over and damaged the fence as it went down. Other than that, we fared pretty well.”
The North Bay Police Service was also busy responding to weather related calls in the city and Callander, including 14 cases of downed wires.
Rob Cochran has lived in his waterfront home for the past six years. Not once during that entire time does he recall the lake looking as violent as it did on Friday.
“I’ve never seen the lake rough like that before, it was just fascinating to watch. Branches were coming down from the trees around our property. My first instinct was to take some pictures. The second thing that came to mind is these branches are flying through the air, it’s probably not a good idea to be out here,” laughed Cochran.
“So I started taking pictures from inside the house leaning against the window and I could feel the window pulsating from the force of the wind. I went back out to take my flag down because the flag pole was bending back and forth. It wasn’t looking great.”
A check of the property the following morning revealed branches had blown onto the roof and the front porch and yard, but the tall trees were still standing.
“We got off pretty lucky. A section of our dock did blow off. Looking at the water now, it’s all brown and murky after churning all last night. I did see timbers, railway ties that people probably had docks made out of, floating by. They may have washed up on shore by now, but if they haven’t they could create a bit of a hazard for boats, you never know. So the guys need to be careful out there, there could be some logs floating around, some deadheads.”
