Blair Orchards celebrated the start of apple season just five days after a violent summer storm tore through Rockburn and parts of Franklin on August 10.
Strong winds, heavy rain, and driving hail cracked and uprooted hundreds of trees, devastated orchards, and left this year’s apple harvest in question for around 20 producers who reported damage their fruit.
Jeff Blair confirmed 100 per cent of his apple crop was affected by hail. “Usually it is kind of isolated, so we have at least one or two blocks, but it got everything this time,” he said of the storm.
Some of the apples are split. There was such a force of wind that anything on the northwest side of the tree split. Then if you go to the southeast side, they were not hit so bad,” he explained. “When you’re picking for processing, you don’t have to wait on colour,” said Blair, noting he will move his pickers in to start clearing the trees a bit earlier now.
The u-pick season at the orchard will go ahead. Blair explained that customers have grown to understand that when it comes to hail and storm damage, the impact on the apples is out of their control.
Luckily, Blair did not lose any apple trees to the storm, but nearby producers were not so fortunate, he acknowledged, noting a neighbouring orchard lost over 600 trees. “They were actually staked in the rows, and it just took the whole row. They snapped right off,” he said.
Just down the road at Stevenson Orchards, Fred Stevenson said that while some of his apples showed signs of hail damage, there was still a lot of good fruit on his trees. Swaths of trees were covered with hail netting, which protected the apples. “It is not like in 2017 or 2024,” he said, recalling previous storms that wiped out his crop. “There is good fruit in there. I’ll go looking for it,” he said, while admitting it will mean more sorting when they start picking in the last week of August.
Downburst damage
Hinchinbrooke resident Sylvie Crevier believes that her home, located near the intersection of the Rockburn Sideroad and Ridge Road, was at the heart of the storm. “We were in the house, and we were looking out and it was like a white wall. Like lots of fog or a snowstorm. You could not see more than 25-feet in front of you,” she recounted.
The worst of the storm, including large hail, lasted for around 10 to 12 minutes, she said, noting that within that time at least 15 large trees were cracked or uprooted on her property. She said estimates to remove the damaged and downed trees were in the thousands of dollars.
Environment Canada meteorologist Jean-Philippe Bégin confirmed the violent storm produced unidirectional wind gusts between 90 and 100 kilometres per hour. He qualified the storm as a downburst, characterized by powerful winds generated by a rush of cold air that dropped down during the storm. When this heavy air hit the ground, it blasted outwards resulting in strong straight-line winds.
Bégin said that based on the available data, it was possible to rule out a microburst as well as a tornado. “It affected a pretty wide area, whereas when you have a microburst, it is very local and even more narrow that what we had here,” he explained, noting the evidence also ruled out a tornado.
Blair said the United States issued a weather warning for rotation heading towards Churubusco, New York, around 15 minutes before the storm hit. A storm warning was also issued by Environment Canada advising people to take cover. “It came so fast,” he said.
“We lost three trees in our dooryard. They missed our house, but I never even heard them come down. There was such a roar of the wind. It was just like a jet,” he recalled. “It wasn’t until after the storm, we went out. Three big maples, and they’re gone. It’s crazy!” he exclaimed.
The hectares of maple bushes in the area were perhaps even more severely damaged by the storm. Many trees were cracked, leaving sections completely devastated. In some cases, the downed branches and trees in sugar bushes damaged production equipment and pipelines as well.
“It will make you cry because, you know, with apples, you’ve got another crop that will come back next year. When you lose 200-year-old trees like that, they are not coming back anytime soon,” said Blair. “They are used to leaning on one another in a windstorm,” he added, noting the loss of so many trees will mean sugar bushes could be less resilient to future winds.
The cleanup in the bush will have to wait until the end of the apple season at Blair’s and at Stevenson’s.
“It is Mother Nature doing a natural thinning process,” quipped Stevenson.
“A lot of these trees went through the 1998 ice storm,” he commented, while looking at the carnage to his maples. “Their fracture points for a lot of these trees were there,” he explained, noting the tensile strength of the giant trees was simply not enough to withstand the storm.