A large shed used to cover the Eedy family’s farm machinery, but now that shed is a rolled up ball of metal and wood. “It was a tornado. A tornado came through late yesterday afternoon,” said Sandra Eedy, who lives and farms near Winthrop. While the Eedy’s themselves walked away unscathed, a mechanic working on their combine in the shed, held onto that combine for dear life, as the storm rolled through Huron and Perth counties, around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. “He did come out unscathed, but not without a lot of bad memories. The walls just fell out. But, I assume that’s after the roof came off. So ,that’s the mess. The steel is everywhere. It went right across the county road. How nobody was in the path of that when it was coming through, is amazing, It’s probably best, because there could have been actually more people hurt from it, as it was going through the air,” said Eedy. A few concessions away, Kevin Murray’s family got hit with a double whammy, damage to their home, and the entire loss of their family’s century old barn. “The grain bin, it moved from it’s foundation, and our barn next door, it’s down, and a bunch of the neighbors sheds and barns are down, too. It’s pretty bad,” said the Winthrop area farmer. On Sawmill Road near Winthrop, more than six sheds or barns were flattened by the violent storm. Further east, towards Monkton, a 5 storey high steel grain bin bent in half, by Wednesday’s strong winds. In Seaforth, the local golf course lost more than 50 trees, and is closed indefinitely. All told, damage stretches from as far west as Bayfield, and as far east as Cambridge. The hardest hit areas of Midwestern Ontario, appear to be concentrated on an area from Seaforth, Egmondville, and Clinton, through Kinburn, Winthrop, Brodhagen, Bornholm, and south of Monkton. Hydro remains out for thousands of residents in Huron and Perth Counties. “I was just moving my truck from underneath those trees there, and I put it in the back yard, and then the wind came up, and I couldn’t even see the highway for the rain. Some lady pulled in my laneway because she couldn’t see. And so I sat there till it let up a bit, and my neighbor ran across the road to me and said, your tree fell down on your house. I never even seen it. I never heard it. So, I come out here, and there it is,” said Tony McDonald, cleaning up a tree leaning on his house in Kinburn. Tornado investigators with the Northern Tornadoes Project are in the region, combing through the damage. With no visible funnel clouds caught on camera, they’re not yet able to say the damage in Huron and Perth Counties is from a tornado, but whatever it was, it left a swath of field and property damage across a vast area. “Scott, it’s just like it picked it up, picked the shed up, and put it in the neighbor’s field. That’s essentially what happened,” said Eedy. “The trampoline took out our hydro wire to the house. I have never seen anything like that. We had hail come in ‘91, but nothing like this at all. The fields are flat, the corn’s flat. It’s not nice, at all,” said Murray.
