Bewildered Grimsby residents stumbled out of their homes Wednesday morning and wondered if they were dreaming.

While they blinked and rubbed their eyes, town snowplows cleared the roads, neighbours raked leaves into piles, while others gaped at the wreckage left after a freak overnight hail storm.

“I’ve lived here since 1962,” said Lorne Avenue resident John Mitchell. “And I’ve never seen something like this. Never. It’s absolutely incredible.”

The storm started at about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday with heavy rain, high winds and hail battering an area that pretty much just included Grimsby.

Gardens were ruined. A canopy shelter on Lorne Avenue had bullet sized holes in it. Leaves and grass lay scattered on piles of hail built up by town staff on the road shoulder.

“It looked like winter last night,” said Mitchell’s neighbour of 46 years, Mary Mota. “Our front lawn was completely white this morning.”

That was the least of the damage. The storm caused power outages, flooding and tree branches to fall on vehicles and even one home. It also caused major damage to local agricultural operations.

    “We had some flooding and minor damage (throughout the town),” said Sgt. Steve Scriven of the Niagara Regional Police, noting a large tree fell on a home on Kingsway Boulevard, causing “severe damage.”

An ancient tree, 11-feet around, fell on Geoff Taylor’s Kingsway home during the night.

“I was watching the storm under a canopy out back,” said Taylor Wednesday, while assessing the damage. “That’s life, I guess.”

Deputy Fire Chief Mike Cain said he hasn’t seen anything like this before.

“It was an extraordinary event for the community as well as the fire department,” said Cain.

The fire department responded to a flurry of calls between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.

Cain said there was everything from downed trees to alarm re-activations to a motor vehicle collision on the QEW. There was even a resident whose vehicle was caught in flooding under the railway bridge on Elizabeth Street, near the Grimsby Legion.

“The car was pretty much buried (in water),” he said.

Cain said in all cases, residents were caught off guard by the freak weather.

“Everyone we talked to acknowledged it’s a unique experience they haven’t seen before,” Cain said.

It was especially unique for  visiting Spanish students. On Brierwood Avenue, just off Livingston Avenue, the students took a break from their morning class at Grimsby Secondary to make snow angels.

“Back home, they only see snow in the mountains,” said Ald. Dave Kadwell, out for a fresh morning walk with his dog on Wednesday.

The weather had a major impact on Puddicombe Farms in Winona. Murray Puddicombe said preliminary estimates are that the storm could have caused as much as $300,000 damage to numerous crops on his 150-acre farm on Highway 8.

“It was pretty severe,” Puddicombe said.

A long list of crops were affected, he said, including sour cherries, peaches, apples, grapes and even pumpkin plants.

“When it comes to peaches, one mark and it it’s not marketable,” he said. “For our grapes, it devastated the vines and knocked off bunches.”

The storm poured about 23.5 millimetres of rain on Grimsby in a short period Tuesday night, according to data collected at an official climate station for Environment Canada on the Grimsby escarpment.

Bill Hepburn, who operates the station as a volunteer with his wife Kerry, said at one point they even measured the hail to be 3.2 centimetres in diameter.

“Anything over two centimetres is considered severe,” said Hepburn, who works for Environment Canada.
The hail, according to their data, fell in less than a 10-minute span on the escarpment — from 10:49 to 11:58 p.m.

Environment Canada had issued a warning at 10:45 p.m., indicating radar showed the severe thunderstorm travelling through the Niagara Region. That warning, however, ended at 11:36 p.m. — well after the freak storm was finished.

Severe warnings had been issued throughout the afternoon leading into the evening. At 5:30 p.m., Environment Canada had even issued a warning of possible tornados in Niagara Region, with a funnel cloud spotted in Welland. That never touched down, however.