It's been a summer of extreme weather. All around the world and across Canada, people have experienced drought, extreme heat, typhoons, floods, tornadoes and wildfires with their resulting smoke. Here in Ottawa we have mostly been lucky. We started off the summer with wildfire smoke and extreme heat but that all subsided into a fairly usual summer.
Except for the storms. Last Thursday, August 3rd, a tornado touched down in the southern section of Ottawa. It's the the thirrd time that has happened here this summer. We are getting used to alerts on our phones, warning us of damaging thunderstorms and/or tornados. Click here to read Bruce Deachman's piece in the Ottawa Citizen.
On Friday July 28th, I was driving near the Experimental Farm, about ten minutes from our house, when a violent thunderstorm hit. I couldn't see where I was going so I pulled over and waited it out, as hail pounded the car. For those few minutes I was scared, as I wondered how long it would last and what else might happen.
When it subsided I slowly drove home, to avoid the gigantic puddles on many streets. It turned out that I had stopped in an area that was not that hard hit, compared to our neighbourhood. The hail where I stopped my car was not large enough to leave any marks. However, any cars that were parked in our neighbourhood were left with dimpled roofs. The hail here was golf ball sized! One of the unexpected outcomes was our damaged screens. The sideways hail was so strong that the screens on the west side of our house now have holes. The flashing on our roof is dimpled. Homeowners with older windows found some to be cracked or broken.
As I spoke to my husband and others who were home at the time of the storm, they all said the same thing. They were scared. They thought all their windows were going to break. After it all stopped we surveyed the damage and got to work, raking the leaves and branches. It seemed like fall when you drove around, with so many folks out raking, in the middle of summer. (And then there was the totally annoying sound of leaf blowers, at all hours. How I hate those things ! ) We were lucky. We didn't lose any trees around us.
And so, we got off relatively unscathed. We have 5 small screens to repair but that's nothing compared to the catastrophic weather events happening all over. If we were scared for five minutes, what is it like for those caught in a flash flood, or in wildfires ? What it is like to go to bed, with your bags packed, knowing that you might suddenly have to evacuate your home?
The 5 minutes of trauma here is nothing compared to what so many experience every day in war torn countries. In Niger now, in Syria, in Ukraine...how do those people go about their daily lives, knowing that everything could be violently destroyed at any moment?
As I write this, it's a sunny morning and the cicadas are singing. to tell me that it's going to be a hot day, a day to go for a swim perhaps. And so we go about our ordinary lives, spending summer time with family and friends, while evidence of climate change hovers around us.
