On the evening of Tuesday, August 7, 1979, at least three tornadoes touched down in southwestern Ontario, devastating scores of farms and homes in the Woodstock area.
During the late morning of the 7th the front had stalled across the Bruce Peninsula, where newer convection produced a couple of weak F1 tornadoes near the towns of Wiarton and Tara.
[2] It has been speculated that a large outflow boundary associated with these particular storms may have interacted with the lake breeze fronts, thus resulting in the Woodstock and Stratford tornadic supercells later that day.
Moving to the southeast at approximately 60 km/h, it quickly became stronger and as it passed north of Hickson some twenty minutes later, its path had widened to 1 kilometre as the tornado attained F4 intensity.
Among some of the other oddities were a pond in Southside Park that was reportedly sucked dry by the tornado, and a fourteen-foot aluminum boat carried for almost a kilometre.
A partially filled, forty-foot silo constructed of concrete six inches thick, toppled over on a farm somewhere between Oxford Centre and New Durham.
In addition to the powerful tornado at hand, hail the size of tennis balls fell north of its track, destroying entire tobacco fields on dozens of farms (Newark, 1979).
Plowing southeastward, the tornado damaged several more homes in the north end of Waterford at 8:00pm before dissipating southeast of that town, after nearly 60 kilometres on the ground.
On the ground for twenty kilometres, this satellite vortex was comparatively weaker (probably of F0 or F1 intensity) and paralleled the Woodstock tornado track as it moved southeast.
[1] Given the immense amount of damage at hand, the number of people affected, and the relative lack of effective weather warnings, it is remarkable that so few were killed.
In yet another remarkable twist, all manner of debris carried by the Woodstock tornado began appearing near the shores of Lake Erie (Toll, 1980).
Ambulances from all over the region (Kitchener, Tillsonburg, London, St. Thomas, and Simcoe) converged on the towns and farms hit hardest by the tornadoes.
Local Mennonites also played a significant role in the rebuilding process, with hundreds working tirelessly each day to repair the farming communities of Oxford Centre, New Durham, and Vanessa.