If Canada's tornado alley is shifting east, how can we better prepare?
CBC
When Jacques Juneau and Chantal Germain bought their home in Saint-Adolphe-D'Howard, Que., it seemed like the perfect spot.
Nestled among the trees and surrounded by mountains, it felt safe.
"[I thought] there's no chance of any kind of storm, tornado or anything here," said Germain.
But a year after moving to the Laurentians, they were enjoying a drink on the patio when everything went eerily quiet. Within seconds, the wind picked up and the trees began to sway violently.
"We started to hear the large pines all cracking and then breaking in the middle and it went, rapidly, very rapidly at that point and then we could see everything falling," said Juneau.
"It felt like an eternity, but in reality it was about two or three minutes max."
Luckily, they were uninjured and none of the trees fell on their home. But the devastation from the EF-2 tornado — which produced winds that reached nearly 200 km/h — was clear.
Multiple homes were destroyed, trees were ripped out of the ground and roads were blocked by fallen debris. There was no power for days and Quebec provincial police had to be called in to prevent looting.
It took months for the municipality to clear all the toppled trees, said Juneau.
"When you're dealing with smaller communities that are outside of the greater Montreal region, they don't have the budget, they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the people," he said.
Since 2017, Western University's Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) has tracked and investigated how many tornadoes are hitting Canada to improve awareness and better predict severe weather.
Using statistics from 1980, Quebec ranks fourth in the country for tornadoes after Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
But over the past decade, there seems to be more tornadoes happening in Ontario and Quebec and fewer in the Prairies, said NTP executive director Dr. David Sills.
It follows a trend observed in a couple studies from the United States.