Ground Zero: Tornado!

There are lots of challenges to face when running a business, but no one could have prepared us for the day when a tornado tore through town. On Thursday August 20th, our workshop was devastated by a F2 scale twister that did damage to the entire region. In only 15 seconds our roof was ripped off and the walls came tumbling down around us. Thankfully, everyone got out of the building safely, including me, from what remained of our second floor office. 

Here is our building, on a lovely sunny day in July.  

 
Here is an image taken with my phone about 3 minutes after the tornado hit. The ladder to the second floor was put there by my partner Thomas, who went back up into the office to rescue my laptop and our back-up hard drives, without which we would be lost. You can imagine how unhappy the emergency crews were when they saw that Thomas had re-entered the building. The hydro lines were down all around us, gas lines were broken and the area was not safe. They wanted us out of there ASAP!

You can read more about our experience with the tornado, and how it narrowly missed our house too, in this article from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.