Tornado Hits Hartington and Rips Through South Frontenac

Brenda and John Lesperance moved to the farm, where Brenda grew up, a little over 20 years ago. John had been in the military, and was posted in rural Quebec and Montreal over this career. Throughout the decades they would visit Brenda's parents at the farm, which was at one time a thriving dairy operation and remained a working farm.

When John retired over 20 years, they bought the farm from Brenda's parents to keep it in the family and have a place for an active retirement. Since then, they have been maintaining and improving the historic buildings on the 500-acre property, which is located on Quarry Road, at the end of Boyce Road, just outside of Hartington.

Although they no longer keep animals, the land is still in production, with fields being cultivated by a neighbouring farmer.

The two barns have been shored up with cables, the foundations repointed. Everything is as it should be, or was.

Last Tuesday (June 30) was a hot, muggy day, one of the first such days this summer, and Brenda and John were sitting in their kitchen as a large afternoon thunderstorm rolled in.

But this storm was different, certainly for people living in a narrow band, where a tornado came through.

“As it came in, it wasn't like a thunder storm coming through. The storm was literally banging the house. It sounded like a sledgehammer banging on the walls. And we could not see anything outside. We must have been in the eye of the storm,” John recalled on Thursday.

“And then very quickly it was over, and we saw what was left behind the house.”

The house itself was intact, but the century old maple at the front of the house, which John described as a signature feature of the house and property, had been split. The main trunk, which is close to the front door of the house, is still in place, but a large section is laying in the front yard.

Behind the house, is a drive-shed that is still standing, but the roof has caved in. Two lawn tractors seem to be undamaged but they have pieces of the roof structure pinning them down.

But a few feet back from the there, two barns, a horse barn and the main cattle barn, only a few feet, have had their top halves ripped off and sent flying. All the roof structure, wood and tin, is spread around the property and beyond.

The main barn is gone from the bottom of the hay mow, level up. Much of the roof is on the ground next to it, but some of the structure landed in the yard of a neighbouring farm at least 200 metres away. There is tin hanging on hydro lines, on trees, strewn about everywhere.

Miraculously, aside from the maple tree, which an arborist has wrapped together and thinks can be saved, and a heat pump that was ripped off its base and sent into a field nearby, the house is unscathed. A pot of delicate young basil seedlings is sitting as it was by the back porch, metres away from all the rubble.

All of the hand-hewn beams in the main barn remain in place, and on Thursday, the insurance adjuster, whose own street in Kingston happened to have also been hit by the same storm, arrived to survey the damage.

John said he hopes to repair the building, but that will depend on a number of factors. Heavy rains the day after the storm have damaged a lot of the contents of both barns.

Ray Leonard, a South Frontenac council member who lives down the road, told the CBC that he has known the farm and the barns “all my life and it's heartwrenching to see something like this happen to us. This was the worst of it for sure.”

The storm headed from Hartington to Harrowsmith where it crossed Road 38 in the middle of the village, knocking trees down over road 38. The trees took out hydro lines, and blocked the road, but in a stroke of luck, they did not take hit any of the houses, and there were no injuries as the result of the storm. Road 38 was closed for a time, until crews could clear the trees and Ontario Hydro crews worked to restore power to the village and vicinity.

It is not hard to see where it crossed Harrowsmith-Sydenham Road on its southeast journey to Kingston, a massive Oak is down, just off the corner of Peters Road. Crews working to tear down the stands at the Line Spike festival, which had ended two days earlier, saw the storm pass near them.

The tornado was confirmed by the Northern Tornados Project, and its 18.3 kilometre track is the third longest in Canada, so far this year. It packed winds of up to 150km/hr, and was classed as an EF-1 storm by project researchers. A related storm, created by the same meso-vortex, and tracked for over ten kilometres in East Kingston. That storm was not as strong, classed as an EF-0 storm with winds of about 115km/hr.

Storm crews were still working on Canada Day, and between the damage and the heat index on that day, organisers of planned Canada Day events at Centennial Park, that attract a large crowd each year, were cancelled. Events elsewhere in the township, at The Point Park in Sydenham, Glendower Hall, and the Storrington Lions Hall, went ahead as scheduled.