Rare November tornadoes touch down in two New Brunswick communities

An Ontario-based research team has confirmed a pair of tornadoes touched down in central New Brunswick less than an hour away from one another last week.

A pair of small tornadoes made landfall in both Harvey, N.B., and Sheffield, N.B., around 5 p.m. on Friday.

Before Nov. 1, the latest tornado of a calendar year ever recorded in New Brunswick was September in the 1960s.

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“The reports we have so far is that the damage was fairly minor,” says Dave Sills, executive director with the Northern Tornadoes Project out of Western University, which tracks and records all tornadoes nationwide.

Sills says the tornadoes are currently rated as EF-0, which is the lowest peg on the severity scale when it comes to measuring twisters.

The Sheffield tornado was confirmed through a video taken by resident Donny Young. Young first started taking the video only to get a shot of the big storm blowing through.

It wasn’t until after he posted the video to Facebook he realized he had caught the tornado beginning to form.

“Until the video started reaching some traction online, I had no idea it was as significant as what it was,” says Young. “A few people down river here had some objects blow from their door here and there kind of thing, but no significant damage that anybody has heard of yet.”

Young says he has never seen a storm like that since moving to the Sheffield area a few years ago.

Sills says a team with the Northern Tornadoes Project has arrived in the area and will be conducting site surveys in both Harvey and Sheffield to learn more about the tornadoes. He expects results from their findings to be available on the organization’s website by the end of day Wednesday.

He also makes note of the length of this year’s tornado season in Canada. The first tornado was recorded in southern Ontario in mid-March, with this most recent pair of twisters in New Brunswick making the season almost eight months in length.

He says tornadoes later, or earlier, in the season could become more common as a result of climate change.

“As we warm, the season will get longer and there'll be more opportunities for tornadoes during outbreaks of heat that come even in the shoulder seasons,” says Sills. “As we collect more data, we might be able to pick up some trends to show connections, long-term trends, connections to climate change and these type of things.”

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