Belleville resident John Vandervoort stares in wonderment at the large fallen tree that now covers his front lawn.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, unbelievable,” said Vandervoort.
The Catalpa tree on Vandervoorts’ yard is just one example of the extensive damage that happened during a short but intense storm that blew through Belleville and across southeastern Ontario late Thursday afternoon.
Vandervoort says his daughter alerted him during the storm that the tree was on the losing end of the battle with the high winds.
“She said, ‘Dad, the tree next door is coming down,'” Vandervoort told Global Kingston. “It was like slow motion — it just landed.”
Belleville Deputy Fire Chief Don Carter says calls for service started coming in around 3 p.m.
“For a few minutes we couldn’t even see out the windows of our dispatch centre, so it was blowing by pretty good here at the station,” said Carter commenting on the storms’ ferocity.
At least one commercial building in the city’s downtown had its roof ripped off and solar panels on top of an apartment building also came tumbling down Thursday.
Downed power lines left thousands of people without electricity immediately following the storm.
“At the peak, we had about 15,000 residents out of power. Our crews worked really hard in the afternoon, we were down, I think, to about 9,400 by six o’clock,” said Belleville Mayor Mitch Panciuk Friday while out surveying the damage in the city.
Panciuk estimates it will take several weeks to completely clean up and repair the damage caused by the storms.