Estimated $85 million in claims from Leamington, Ont. tornado

The Leamington tornado generated 4,750 home, commercial and auto claims totaling an estimated $85 million, a preliminary report finds. The majority of the claims were for homes, the Insurance Bureau of Canada says, based on data from PCS Canada.

In the early morning hours of June 6 — around 3 a.m. — an F1 tornado, about onekilometre wide, touched down in Essex County, along the shore of Lake Erie, southwest of Leamington, according to Environment Canada. There was also a one-kilometre wide and fivekilometre long track of straight-line wind damage associated with the same storm, Environment Canada added.

Environment Canada continued surveying after the storm, as there was an additional 35-kilometre-long stretch of damage that needed to be investigated.

Of the 80 or so tornadoes reported in Canada in each year, Ontario receives the largest number — on average, about one-third of them, says Glenn McGillivray, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reductions’ managing director. That’s about two per 10,000 square kilometres. In and of itself, a tornado in Leamington is not a rarity. But the time at which this one struck was unusual, he observed.

“Unfortunately the hour at which the storm struck — which proves wrong the fallacy that tornadic storms can’t strike at night — placed more lives at risk because most would be asleep at 3 a.m..,” McGillivray observed. The storms highlight the need for weather radios, a broadcast service that emits alarms when warnings are issued by Environment Canada, McGillivray said. •