Cleanup begins after swift Thursday thunderstorm

A thunderstorm that swiftly swept through Windsor-Essex Thursday left a trail of power outages and downed branches in its wake that look to take days to clean up.

Windsor’s Ward 4 Councillor Mark McKenzie posted to social media in the aftermath reminding residents to report fallen limbs through the city’s 311 app, or by actually calling 3-1-1.

“There are many trees down throughout the city and our crews are already out working and will continue for the next few days until all jobs are completed,” he wrote.

On the west side of the city, resident Abdul Malik was watching as a branch hit power lines, sparking and knocking out the neighborhoods power with a loud pop.

“It sounded like an explosion,” he said. “Everyone jumped back. Even the firefighter guys jumped back.”

He said crews told him power would probably not be restored until the early hours of Friday morning.

Around the corner from that incident, Brenda Nelson was cooking dinner when the storm blew a branch onto lines outside her home.

“I went in and flipped my pork chops and heard a big thud. I came out and this is what I witnessed,” she said, gesturing to a large limb tangled in wires.

Up the street from her, another big branch took Kirk Donnelly’s brick chimney off.

“What a mess,” he said while laughing. “We’ve got to clean it up. It was on the sidewalk,” he said.

Both he and Nelson still had power – and said the damage could’ve been a lot worse.