THUNDER BAY — Clean-up has been ongoing after a violent windstorm swept through sections of the south side of Thunder Bay on Tuesday evening.
“The last two days have been spent entirely on storm damage clean-up, specifically on the south side,” said Tim Nosworthy, an owner-operator of Rutter Urban Forestry, who was on Mary Street removing a tree that had fallen on a retired resident’s truck.
He estimated the company received more than a dozen residential calls, as of Thursday morning, through insurance companies from private homeowners requesting that their felled trees be cleaned up.
"This is probably the hardest hit area… We’ve had three crews rolling around. We’ve removed maybe upwards of a dozen large trees. There have been many other crews in the area, city crews, other contractors as well, but we’ve been focused on taking trees off houses, as you can see, and a lot of trees failed in backyards.”
Greg Polhill, the property owner, was watching a Blue Jays game when the hail started shortly after 5 p.m. and his neighbour’s tree fell onto his truck.
The tree appeared to cause some extensive damage to the truck’s right front fender and hood.
“It’s kind of a frightening thing because had it been my vehicle not been there, probably would have taken out a pretty good portion of the front of my house and by where those branches are, I was probably in the line of fire,” said Polhill.
With the weight of the tree resting on the truck and preventing further damage to the house, Polhill said he did not want to try to drive it and let it ride until the experts came and removed it.
“I was only a matter of maybe 15 feet away from where the tree fell. Never heard a thing,” said Polhill.
“My wife went around the side of the house and she called me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a tree problem here’ and I looked and I went ‘oh my god.’ It was laying on my truck and I figured, ‘well, nothing I can do about it right now.’ Thankfully, you got the guys here from Rutter, they’re doing an excellent job.”
There is always some major windstorm, at least one a year, said Nosworthy, so it’s not unusual.
“I think with climate change we’re seeing probably a slight increase in the number of events that are happening, but it’s hard to say,” he added.
However, Nosworthy believed the windstorm was an isolated event on Canada Day.
“There was probably a microburst in this area that blew over several trees and anytime you get wind over say 70 or 80 kilometres an hour, then you start to see trees uprooting. Even healthy and structurally sound trees start to have failures, so that’s what we saw in this area,” said Nosworthy, who is also an ISA-certified and Ontario-qualified arborist.
He said a major wind event like this opens people’s eyes to things and is a good opportunity for people to think about their trees, as well as potentially call certified arborists to come out and assess their trees.
“A qualified or certified arborist is going to be able to look at the tree, make a sound assessment and give you a really good idea or sense of what needs to be done. We have a lot of tools in our toolbox to help mitigate some of the risk involved with trees,” said Nosworthy.
Nosworthy said there are options for homeowners and encourages them to reach out to a certified arborist like them if they have questions.
“We have structural pruning, limb reductions, we have cables and braces we can actually put in trees to help protect them,” said Nosworthy.
