SURPRISE TORNADO SHOCKS WINDSOR RESIDENTS.
Hundreds out of work as plants damaged
WINDSOR • Garbage dumpsters were thrown the length of a football field. A 50- metre concrete wall was reduced to rubble. Massive cube vans were dragged across a parking lot.
The daylight calm following Wednesday night’s terrifying twister brought a clearer picture of the widespread destruction left behind. It also gave the stunned people who survived it a chance to reflect on how narrowly they avoided the tornado’s wrath.
Ben Graham, a trainer at a gym in the heart of the destruction, said Thursday it was “overwhelming” how close he came to death.
“We were about to leave, myself and one of my clients, and a big piece of steel fell on one of the cars in the parking lot,” said Graham.
“There wasn’t really any storm going on at that point. It had rained a little bit but it was pretty quiet. At that point a couple went toward the windows to see what happened, because steel doesn’t usually fall on vehicles. That’s when another big piece about 12 or 15 feet just obliterated my vehicle.”
Environment Canada has confirmed at least one tornado struck without warning and barrelled through parts of Windsor and LaSalle Wednesday night. There was “notable damage” to about 15 homes in LaSalle. In Windsor, the twister left a long trail of brutal and costly destruction.
Hundreds of people are out of work as companies in one industrial zone scramble to repair heavily- damaged buildings and figure out how to meet client expectations.
Windsor Disposal Services and Kautex, which makes auto parts, were among the companies shut down Thursday.
“There’s a lot of people out of work right now and we will do our best to get the plant up and running,” said Sri Srikantha, a control en- gineer at Kautex. “I want to get this plant back up and running quick so we can all go back to work.”
Srikantha left work around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, so he missed the tornado. But when he heard it had struck, he returned.
“When I came back here I saw a lot of damage, especially the west side,” said Srikantha. “The wall is crumbling down and the roof is gone. Also, our three biggest transformers — million- dollar ones — are all gone.”
For most people, t he monster storm struck without warning. Graham said it had hardly rained when that 15- foot piece of steel dropped from the sky. When the second hunk of steel hit his car, he got worried.
“I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to get away from the windows, I don’t know what’s going on,’ ” said Graham. “That’s when the storm started to pick up. The roof was shaking, water started coming in through the roof. The door swung open. It was pretty overwhelming. We were all sort of huddled back in the closet waiting for it to pass over.”
When the storm finally fell silent, they reluctantly ventured outside.
“You could see all the steel was hanging off the utility poles,” said Graham. “Then I looked over to the Graybar building and it was just ripped open like a tin can. That was when we realized, OK, a tornado may have just come through here about 10 metres away.”
On Thursday, the scale of destruction was even more evident.
The roofs of many buildings were ripped off. Walls were gone. Tree branches, wrecked cars, insulation and wooden pallets littered the landscape. Thousands of rocks were sucked up and spit back out to blanket large swaths of land. Overturned garbage dumpsters and hunks of building were sitting in fields hundreds of metres from where they started.
“After we went outside and we saw all the debris around us, which looks like a bomb went off, that’s when it kind of set in we were that close to it,” said Graham. “We could have potentially been killed. It was pretty overwhelming after that.”
Matthew Gagnier was one of the few who saw it coming. A truck driver, he is one of the people now out of work. He’s taking it all in stride.
“Sit at home, relax, probably enjoy a couple beers a nd hope t he weather doesn’t get worse tonight.”