The owner of a Riverside home is sharing details following last Thursday’s tornado that tore the roof off his home.
Speaking on AM800’s Mornings with Mike and Meg, homeowner Ed was in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time of the storm but says his wife was inside their home on Riverside Drive near Buckingham.
“She was sitting at our breakfast counter overlooking the river and decided it was smart to go downstairs, so she stayed downstairs for a while and thought it was very, very quiet, so we decided for her to go to the top of the stairs and have a look. She went up there, and everything looked very ugly,” he says. “She went back down into the basement, and not a minute later all hell broke loose. It felt like the entire foundation of the house was going to cave in, and in comes our windows and our roof. Our roof actually ended up a block over on Ford.”
Ed says his wife was able to get out of the home through a basement door and went to a neighbour’s house.
He says his wife is still emotionally charged by last week’s event.
He says he didn’t know what to expect when he returned from Arizona.
“I just knew there was going to be a lot of work ahead,” he says. “It was really heart-wrenching.”
He says they’ll know more today on the future of the home.
“The insurance company is bringing a structural engineer,” he says. “So they’re either going to decide to demolish the house or repair it, so we’ll find out sometime today what the whole event is going to happen.”
He says besides the damage to the home, everybody is safe, but there are definitely some emotional scars.
As AM800 news reported last week, the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) at Western University in London sent a team to the area on Friday to survey and assess the damage from the storm.
The NTP confirmed a tornado with a rating of EF1 that was packing a max wind speed of 165 km/h.
The rating was based on both structural and tree damage.
In a posting on Facebook, the NTP says the tornado appears to be a continuation of an EF2-rated tornado that came through Detroit and crossed the Detroit River, as confirmed by the US National Weather Service.
The storm knocked down power lines, uprooted and broke tree limbs, and damaged several homes in Windsor-Essex.
Most of the damage was in Windsor’s east end in the Riverside and Forest Glade neighbourhoods.
A tornado in the Wheatley area was also confirmed.