Brief, but powerful storms left a mess for residents in the London region Sunday.
London Hydro officials tell AM980 that at one point, about 3,500 customers were without power Sunday evening.
The majority were only in the dark for a few hours, but roughly 625 customers had to wait until 3:30 a.m. before power was restored.
Division manager of transportation and roadside operations with the city, John Parsons, told AM980 the cleanup is likely to take a couple of weeks.
“We have some trees down at Victoria Park, some of our signature parks like Gibbons Park and Harris Park, a lot of work to do there. We received over 100 calls this morning and we’re just assessing those right now. All of the roads have been opened up and we’re cleared off there. There’s still some debris on some sidewalks that we have to go around and pick up.”
Parsons added that the city budgets for this type of cleanup and also has reserve funds to tap into if necessary as damaging storms are common this time of year.
“With a couple weeks of cleanup, what it means is we’ve suspended some of our tree trimming program and other maintenance type of work to focus on storm clean-up so we do have crews that we can put on to it and we’ve done that today.”
Severe weather meteorologist with Environment Canada, Mitch Meredith, notes that investigators are reviewing the damage.
“We’re always gathering information a few days after any storm occurs just to see exactly what happened and we’re reviewing radar as well,” he told AM980.
“We have reports of tree limb damage, we had hail that looked the size of marbles to almost 2 centimetres, we also had just south of Parkhill a property where a full RV trailer was toppled over.”
Environment Canada is also investigating the possibility that a tornado touched down in the Parkhill area, but Meredith said there is currently no evidence to support that claim.
The chance of thunderstorms continues early this week. Showers are expected Monday evening into the overnight hours with a risk of a thunderstorm. On Tuesday, Environment Canada is forecasting a 60 per cent chance of rain and a risk of thunderstorms before sunshine returns on Wednesday.
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