Resiliency on the Farm

Katrina and Chris Anderson and their two sons have spent an idyllic eight years on Kinburn Farm, half an hour west of downtown Ottawa between Arnprior and Carp. Sure, they’ve had their share of bad weather — frigid cold, sweltering summers, drenching downpours, high winds — but these are the price of admission to a way of life that brings them all great satisfaction. It’s not nirvana, though. As Katrina will tell you, “It isn’t always rainbows and lollipops on the farm.”

And it certainly wasn’t on Sept. 21, 2018.

That was the day that tornadoes struck the National Capital Region. Six of them, in fact, according to Environment Canada. Four were minor, but two were devastating — one affecting Dunrobin and Gatineau and another touching down in Nepean in the geographical centre of the City of Ottawa.

Katrina, Chris and their two boys, whom she declined to name, but are 10 and 12, were outside playing in the high winds that preceded the tornado.

“Those were crazy winds and I’d brought the guys outside to show them,” Katrina recalls. “We were actually having a lot of fun.”

But then the youngest boy pointed and said: “That’s a funny-looking cloud.”

And then, “We noticed that the clouds seemed to start spiraling,” she says.

“Chris said, 'That’s a funnel,'” and they immediately understood that something ominous was unfolding.

Within seconds the funnel touched the earth and the family suddenly saw trees flying through the air. Then they saw their neighbour’s barn aloft. And then the funnel started moving directly towards them.

“That’s when it got very, very real,” Katrina recalls. “I shouted that we had to grab the dogs and get straight in the house.”

On the way in, they ran past the swimming pool. “It looked so bizarre,” she says. “Half of the water was calm like glass and the other half had white caps. So weird.”

The four of them and the dogs ran down to the basement — and perhaps two or three seconds later, the tornado with its 265 kilometre-per-hour winds struck their home.

They heard glass hit the floor above — their front room window had been blown out.

In only a few seconds, calm returned and they could go up and inspect the damage. “We looked around and it was all so unbelievable,” Katrina says.

The front room had been blown off the house. The chimney was destroyed. The roof was ripped off their garage. Piles of tin were lying everywhere. A recently built large metal bin in which they stored much of their farm equipment was destroyed right down to the foundation. Fences were demolished. Their recently disused pig barn was destroyed. Along the road, telephone poles were down.