A Tornado at Sainte-Cécile-de-Lévrard.

That summer, at Sainte-Cécile-de-Lévrard, nothing suggested that the fury of the elements was about to be unleashed.

It was a Sunday, 19 August 1923, in the middle of the afternoon; after Sunday mass and a comforting dinner, the people of Sainte-Cécile watched with unease a mass of black clouds blocking the horizon to the west; a good downpour would have been welcome to break the heat of that late summer, but thunderstorms were always feared, and lightning striking a barn full of hay was dreaded above all. The wind had risen with a force rarely seen; from far off you could watch the trees thrashing and bending under the force of the elements, branches, fences and debris flying tens of feet into the air, roofs torn from houses, telephone poles laid flat on the ground, which kept the news from getting out; nowadays social media would be saturated with vivid videos within minutes!

Thirty-two houses and other buildings were reported destroyed, and the damage reached $100,000.00, a considerable sum for the time; on the other hand, there was not a single death, nor even an injury, to lament.

Among the hardest hit was Ferdinand Cinq-Mars, who lost his house and his barns, his stable, his cow barn; what was left to him? Henri Tousignant was also very severely tested. Several others lost a barn, a shed, a cow barn, or their crops.

The government was called upon to help those who had been left with nothing; the mutual insurance company of Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets contributed to compensating the victims, but mutual aid and the work bees organized by the parish priest, Henri Denoncourt, did the rest.

Farther south, at Warwick and in a few neighbouring municipalities, the tornado also caused heavy damage; Sainte-Cécile was the hardest hit of all.

Had this tornado struck a densely populated region, it would have been called catastrophic.

Alain Manset, SHGLB.