‘No one’s going to believe me’: N.B. woman captures rare tornado on camera

A rare tornado is thought to have touched down in New Brunswick.

Kim Bowes has vivid memories of a storm this past Friday evening.

She was sitting on her back deck at her home just outside of Petitcodiac, N.B., with her daughter and son-in-law. The group was looking out at the rain falling over the Pollett River, which runs through the backyard, shortly after 8:30 p.m. It was moments later the storm took a turn, and Bowe began hearing “this ungodly sound.”

“I looked and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, look at these trees are all blowing,” Bowes recalls. “Then it was just a sound, like it almost sounds like a blender.”

That’s when Bowes saw something concerning.

“Then you could see the formation of the darkness of the clouds, and then almost the circular rotation of it, and it was coming towards us,” she says.

Bowes grabbed her phone and began recording the phenomenon. What she captured was the forming of a funnel cloud, and later a small tornado as confirmed by the Northern Tornadoes Project.

“Everything [on the deck] lifted up and we shut the door,” says Bowes, adding she would just stick her arm with the phone out at times to capture the scene.

“All I was concerned about is, ‘Oh my gosh, are we going to lose power? Are the windows going to break? Is something going to go through?’ Then we started seeing debris.”

Just moments later the high winds and tornado-like conditions subsided to merely rain.

Bowes is thankful just a single small tree on the property snapped. The house did not sustain any damage.

“It happened so fast,” says Bowes. “I don’t think it really gave us time to be scared. We’re like ‘What’s going on? Is that what we’re seeing? And then, all of the sudden, I’m like I got to get this on film. No one is going to believe me.’”

She posted the videos to Facebook shortly after capturing the footage at 8:39 p.m. that evening. A matter of minutes after posting the video the comments started pouring in.

“People living two houses up didn’t even see any of the activity,” says Bowes. “Then I was talking to my neighbor up the street, and he said I was sleeping in my recliner, didn’t know any of this was going on two houses down.”

Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) director David Sills says the video provided enough evidence to confirm a tornado. The twister came in at a rating of EF0, signaling very weak tornado. Sills suspects the winds caused by the funnel likely did not exceed even 110 km/h.

“Given the tornado did not cause significant damage, we won’t send out a survey team,” Sills said. “But we will review hi-res satellite imagery to see if a track of downed trees can be found through the forested areas in the vicinity.”

Sills says since the NTP was created in 2017 New Brunswick has had 10 tornadoes, the most of any Atlantic province. Half of those touched down just two years ago in 2024.

CTV has also reached out to Environment Canada to confirm the twister and is awaiting a response.

As for Bowes, she was told her video is the first of any twister in the region since 2024.

“Now my son-in-law and daughter, we want to get t-shirts now, 2026 tornado,” Bowes jokes.

Bowes says she is thankful no one was hurt, and that no one experienced significant damage as a result of the rare weather occurrence.

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