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Thousands of customers are without power Thursday morning after the latest in what’s been a series of strong summer thunderstorms to hit Ottawa-Gatineau.
Storms rolled through the area most of Wednesday afternoon and evening, with an especially powerful one lashing some areas with rain and wind around 10:30 p.m.
“All of a sudden I could see the rain starting, there was a storm coming, and I looked out our back windows and saw lightning. Then a few seconds later it [went] all white like a snowstorm,” said Ann Weatherdon, whose chimney was destroyed when a tree fall on her home near Merivale Road and Meadowlands Drive.
“It was pretty intense, it was pretty quick,” said Travis Hartley, who lives nearby. “We had about [four to six centimetres] of hail, of ice on our deck in the back.”
About 22 millimetres of rain fell at the Ottawa International Airport weather station in 26 minutes on Wednesday night, according to Environment Canada’s Peter Kimbell, a warning preparedness meteorologist.
That station recorded a wind gust of 107 km/h at one point, the strongest gust measured since the May 2022 derecho.
Willow tree branches are snapped off the trunk at Celebration Park on Central Park Drive on Thursday. (Colson Swinarchin/CBC)
A severe thunderstorm watch was issued early Wednesday afternoon, but no warning came until the storm had begun.
“We did not expect the winds, the impact to be so strong.… The warning did come out late,” Kimbell said.
Emergency phone alerts would have been triggered by a tornado warning or red-level severe thunderstorm warning with winds of at least 130 km/h, he added.
Outage updates
As of around 2:00 p.m. Thursday, about 6,100 customers didn’t have power in Ottawa and about 5,000 were out in Gatineau.
The outages are concentrated around the Woodroffe Avenue and Merivale Road areas north of Hunt Club Road in Ottawa, and the Aylmer area of Gatineau.
Hydro Ottawa said its highest number of customers without power was more than 25,000. Hydro-Québec said the Outaouais outages peaked at more than 20,000 customers.
There is not a significant number of local Hydro One outages.
Crews at the corner of Kilmory Crescent and Tiverton Drive remove storm debris on Aug. 13, 2026 after a storm the previous night. (Colson Swinarchin/CBC)
There was another approximately 24 millimetres of rain, much of it during storms, on Monday afternoon and evening at that Ottawa airport.
July was Ottawa’s rainiest month on record at about 282 millimetres, led by the massive July 1 storm that has left many people still shaken when heavy rain falls.