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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That station recorded a wind gust of 107 km\/h at one point, the strongest gust measured since the May 2022 derecho<\/a>.<\/p>\n A severe thunderstorm watch was issued early Wednesday afternoon, but no warning came until the storm had begun.<\/p>\n “We did not expect the winds, the impact to be so strong.\u2026 The warning did come out late,” Kimbell said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Outage updates<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Hydro Ottawa said its highest number of customers without power was more than 25,000. Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec said the Outaouais outages peaked at more than 20,000 customers.<\/p>\n There is not a significant number of local Hydro One outages.<\/p>\n There was another approximately 24 millimetres of rain, much of it during storms, on Monday afternoon and evening at that Ottawa airport.<\/p>\n July was Ottawa’s rainiest month on record<\/a> at about 282 millimetres, led by the massive July 1 storm that has left many people still shaken<\/a> when heavy rain falls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-812600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Willow](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786651210_548_default.jpg\")
Willow tree branches are snapped off the trunk at Celebration Park on Central Park Drive on Thursday. (Colson Swinarchin\/CBC)<\/p>\n![\"Workers](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786651211_922_default.jpg\")
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)<\/p>\n