Canada Day celebrations in Brantford were cut short after a storm ripped through Lion’s Park. Hundreds of people had gathered there on Wednesday for the live music, midway rides, food trucks and local vendors. Everything was going as planned, until around 5 p.m. “[It] was 47 degrees. During the day it was hot, and then it was followed by a storm that snuck up on us,” explained Dave Carrol, chair of Brantford’s Canada Day committee. The band Finger Eleven was on stage when the weather took a turn. “The stagehand got out and said, ‘We are postposing, we are evacuating,’ over the radio,” Carrol said. City workers and organizing crews worked together to get everyone off the field and into three nearby buildings. Once inside, people found other ways to entertain themselves. “Kids were playing basketball, people were having a great time,” recalled Carrol’s daughter Aislin, a summer student hired by the city. “It was quite lively, considering the circumstances.” Outside, however, the strong winds tossed tents and port-a-potties. It even knocking out the power. “You can’t have a festival without tents, power and potties,” Dave reasoned. “So, at that point, we made the tough but actually [the] only obvious choice. We couldn’t continue with the festival.” The decision meant the crowd would miss out on the big headline performance. The fireworks, meantime, were postponed a day. Visitors were encouraged to return to Lion’s Park at 10 p.m. Thursday to watch the promised light show. Volunteers were then tasked with picking up the debris around the park. “In a normal year, we would have had the entire day to clean up,” said Lori-Dawn Cavin, Brantford’s manager of community recreation and events. “We did a call to action, and the park is filled with volunteers that are getting ahead of the litter because there’s going to be another round of litter tonight [after the fireworks].” Vendors left to pick up the pieces Jenn Bloomfield is the owner of A&P Diner. He said his food truck was able to weather the storm. “All of our containers, the covers, they blew off and so it was a little wild for a minute,” Bloomfield recalled. When the power outage hit, he had to pause operations. Then stop altogether when everyone went home. “We blanched potatoes for probably 12 to 14 hours before… so we could sell them during the event,” Bloomfield explained. All of it went to waste. “It works out to about 2,000 lbs. of cooked potatoes that we put in the dumpster,” he said. Despite the loss, Bloomfield knows the situation could have been much worse. “When we looked outside and saw everybody else… they’re the real victims of the storm.”
