Environment Canada reporting strong storms, little damage in region (With video)

Strong storms hit Windsor and Essex County Friday evening but Environment Canada officials say little damage occurred in the area.

Mitch Meredith, severe weather meteorologist at Environment Canada?s Toronto-based Ontario Storm Prediction Centre, said storm teams will be dispatched Saturday to investigate areas reporting damage.

?We?ve got actually a pretty long list of areas (throughout Ontario) that got damages,? Meredith said. ?We?ve got a couple storm damage teams that will be heading out tomorrow to look at those areas ? especially areas where we think there might have been a tornado or where there?s property damage and we?re trying to find out what caused it.?

He said there were no reports from the Windsor/Essex County area as of 11 p.m. Friday.

?We?re getting photos sent to us and people will call in so we?re just not sure at this point if we need to go down there but we?ll probably know by tomorrow.

?We had storms starting up a little bit later than the rest of the province (in Windsor and Essex County) but finally you did get strong storms. We had reports of hail in the Detroit area as well as heavy downpours through Chatham with zero visibility. The lightning was very frequent.

?And we did for a time issue a tornado warning in the area because we saw a storm on radar with strong rotation and it was strengthening ? that was early in the evening.?

Trees and tree branches fell as high winds and driving rain blew through the area but as of 11 p.m., both Essex Power and Hydro One were reporting no known hydro interruptions or outages in the area.

?All utilities are up and running,? said Sgt. Wren Dosant of the Windsor Police Service late Friday night. ?No incidents involving power outages, transformers or anything like that.

?So while it was a nice electrical storm, it didn?t hurt us in any way.?

Meredith said once the expected cold front passes through the area after midnight, the threat of severe weather will be over.

Environment Canada will update its storm summary on webpage as information is collected by the storm teams. Meredith said various storm areas will be rated and they will determine if there were any tornadoes.

For further information, go to Environment Canada?s website at weather.gc.ca and under the weather alerts tab, click on special weather statements for Ontario ? bulletins and storm summary.

Source: http://feeds.canada.com/~r/canwest/F237/~3/DQHRfqQ1nes/story.html

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