35 YEARS AGO, TODAY: 14 Tornadoes Touched Down, Including Two F4's & The Longest Track Tornado in Canadian History

InstantWeather

On Friday, May 31st, 1985, 14 tornadoes touched down across southern Ontario, killing 12 and injuring hundreds. Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the families and friends of those who were lost and injured that day.

Further down the page is a revised 3D fly-through image sequence of the Barrie tornado from Black Friday.

Here are all 14 confirmed Tornadoes with city names for comparison:

Below is the actual radar image from 4:20 PM on May 31st, 1985. In this image, we compared the radar data to the official damage paths from Environment Canada. This wasn't a squall line folks, this was a 'multi-cell supercell' that ended up becoming the most prolific tornado producing storm in our province's history:

The image below is looking east in 3D at all 3 major Tornado tracks at once with radar underneath. Try to imagine three monster Tornadoes, two F4's and one F3 on the ground all at the same time, tracking east through our region at 105 km/h. Pretty horrifying to envision:

Below is a bit of photo editing we did to simulate what Gary Crawford would have experienced when taking the only known photo of the Barrie F4 tornado producing storm. Comparing the photo and damage path, it seems likely the dark feature on the bottom left would have been the rain-wrapped F4 tornado (more details on this investigation we did here: http://barrie.tgps.ca ):

Official Barrie Tornado Track overview:

Below are the revised (and as accurate as possible) images showing the official tornado track. We spent a lot of time making sure this was bang on as our older images were a bit too far south on review:

Here's hoping a day like this never returns to our region.

Our deepest and heartfelt condolences and sympathies go out to the families and friends of those who were tragically killed, those were seriously injured and those who are still to this day traumatized from this event.

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P.S. The link below is a photo album we've put together of damage photos from May 31st, 1985. Please let us know if we've overlooked anything. Thank you:

The 1985 Barrie tornado outbreak was a tornado outbreak in the Canadian province of Ontario, one of the largest and most...

Posted by Ontario Tornado Watch / Ontario Blizzard Watch on Thursday, May 30, 2013

For even more stories, photos and memories from this day, please visit our photo album here:

Just in case you missed our Black Friday Tornado post this morning.

Posted by Ontario Tornado Watch / Ontario Blizzard Watch on Tuesday, May 31, 2016