BARRIE - While Barrie residents are still trying to come to grips with the damage after a tornado ripped through their south-east end neighborhood Thursday afternoon, some are wondering why warnings didn’t come sooner.
An Environment Canada emergency alert was received on cellphones, TVs and other devices across the city at 2:38 p.m., warning that a tornado warning had been issued for the coverage area and warning people to take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches - several minutes after the tornado was reported to have hit.
City councillor Natalie Harris was visiting her son in the area and was alerted to the impending storm by a call from her son’s father before the pair fled to the basement.
“It (the alert) came at the time I went outside (after the tornado hit). I texted Jon outside and then my phone rang with the alert.”
Kimmy Hammel-Ramos said the alert was “absolutely too late.”
“Thankfully it didn't come down the hill. I didn't get the warning until two minutes after it started to get better. I was watching the sky,” she wrote in a conversation on a friend’s Facebook page.
Another poster said they only received a severe storm warning alert, but no tornado warning.
“We did not get an alert until after our house was hit. The front doors exploded open as we were running to our basement for cover.”
Steven Flisfeder, warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told BarrieToday several factors play into the criteria prior to Environment Canada issuing an alert.
“There are a couple of things that build our confidence when a tornado warning needs to be issued. There’s no real threshold … it’s all situational,” he said.
Some of the evidence that helps boost confidence, he continued, includes a confirmed report of a sighting as well as radar.
“We have Doppler radar set up across Canada which we can use to see evidence of rotation within a storm, but it’s not a guarantee a tornado has formed. It’s more an indicator that it could potentially be forming a tornado on the surface. Generally speaking we don’t like to issue a tornado warning if it’s just an indicator on radar.”
In terms of Thursday's event, Flisfeder said the forecast team knew it was an environment conducive to the formation of tornadoes, which they kept in the back of their minds throughout the day as the storms were flaring up.
“They started seeing indications of rotations on radar and that’s one of the reasons they sent out a severe thunderstorm warning initially with the mention of tornadoes being possible,” he said, adding at that point they had not received confirmation of an actual tornado.
“Reports of damage and debris started coming through and those were indicators that helped form their decision to issue the tornado warning itself.”
The first severe thunderstorm watch was issued at 11:58 a.m. which he said served as a “heads up” that severe weather was possible later in the day.
At 2:28 p.m. a severe thunderstorm warning was issued for the Barrie area with mention of a tornado being possible, however at that time there had yet to be any confirmation.
An official tornado warning was issued at 2:39 p.m. to TV, radio and cell phones. Cell phone alerts, he explained, are set up so that they are sent to individuals within a specific distance from cell towers within the warning area.
“We don’t have exact timing of when the tornado touched down. There have been various times stated, but to the best estimates we have right now it touched down somewhere between 2:35 and 2:40 p.m. it’s something we are still actively investigating,” he said.
Flisfeder said with tornado warnings, Environment Canada strives to have warnings and alerts out as soon as possible.
“This is a situation where some people had already experienced the tornado before the warning went out but there were people further downstream who did get at least a couple minutes of advance notice of the tornado being on the ground.
"It is very unfortunate,” he said. “We try to do our best, but the technology with radar and detection is just not at a level quite yet where we can give as much notice as we’d like.”
