Tornado tears apart marina, leaves extensive swath of destruction through town
The most damaging tornado of the night, this probable F2 tornado ravaged the town of Bridgenorth. It came ashore on the east side of Chemong Lake and struck Dutch Marine, where boats were either sunken or plucked from the water and thrown ashore. All of the buildings at the marina were torn apart and levelled, with debris scattered uphill for over a kilometre through the town.
Beyond the marina, the tornado struck dozens of houses, leaving them severely damaged. Windows were smashed and walls pierced and pockmarked by flying debris; a few homes had their roofs torn off. At one, a mother was injured by flying debris as she lay atop her son while attempting to shield him while windows exploded, sections of roofing and walls were torn away and boards from the marina burst in and impaled the walls around them.
One woman died of a heart attack as the tornado struck her home, and this death is often incorrectly attributed to the tornado as a direct casualty.
Continuing on to the east, the tornado ripped through a dense pine forest, reportedly leaving nothing but a field of shredded tree trunks. It then tore apart a county sand dome before passing through rural properties. At one of them, a farm on 7th Line, a barn and silo were completely destroyed with debris scattered for hundreds of metres through area fields.
Shortly after the storm, a police officer reportedly responded to an alarm going off at the south end of Bridgenorth. He drove through the area which was undamaged by the tornado, unaware of the path of destruction just to his north in town. After the call he left the area, having never encountered the damage path, and it was not until the next morning that emergency officials became aware of the devastation in town.
This was one of four tornadoes that touched down in Cottage Country as a violent derecho swept across Central Ontario. The others:
