The chaos only lasted about a minute.
But for Gatineau resident Vincent-Carl Leriche, that was enough to capture a terrifying video from the inside of a tornado that ripped through areas in the nation’s capital on Friday.
Leriche was home on Friday when he noticed an extreme weather warning come in from Environment Canada.
Then many things happened, very quickly.
The electricity to his building went out five minutes later. The tornado arrived less than a minute later.
READ MORE: At least 2 tornadoes touch down near Ottawa; about 185,000 without power in Ontario and Quebec
Leriche was on the building’s third floor as it arrived.
Parts of the roof started to detach themselves from the building and there was debris everywhere.
Then, within a minute it was gone.
“When you are seeing the tornado, it looks like an eternity, but in fact, it was just over a minute,” Leriche told Global News.
But that was all it took for the Gatineau man to decide to pull out his phone.
“That’s probably what they call the millennial generation,” he said.
“I know it was not a very secure move, since any debris can go and smash the window, but I just decided to look at it.”
The tornado appeared to lift after it blew through Leriche’s building.
After that, he surveyed the damage in Gatineau’s Mont-Bleu area.
He said the destruction extended for anywhere between 250 and 500 metres around his building.
Leriche saw cars blown away by the wind, windows smashed and trees strewn across the streets.
READ MORE: Strong winds, heavy rain knock out power for thousands across Quebec
The scene reminded him of the 1996 film Twister, about a series of tornadoes that ripped through Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.
He heard many people screaming outside when the tornado passed, but he saw no one on the ground.
Mostly, he saw that “everybody was out and thanking life that they were still out there.”
Here are some photos that Leriche snapped of the damage in Gatineau:
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