Severe thunderstorm leaves 3-year-old girl in critical condition, cuts power for thousands in Montreal

A violent storm swept across Montreal on Sunday, leaving a three-year-old girl in critical condition and sent five other people to hospital after an inflatable play structure was swept away by powerful wind gusts at Ouellette Park in LaSalle.

The incident occurred around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, when powerful wind gusts lifted tents, debris, and an inflatable play structure loaded with children directly into the air.

The storm struck suddenly during a gathering organized by the Madre dei Cristiani church.

“I look up in the sky and all of a sudden I see this inflated castle for the children,” said Rosella Peluzzo a witness. “It was up at least like 30 to 40 feet and then all of a sudden, like after maybe seconds, it was thrown in a distance all the way down there on the floor, on the ground and there were children inside and these children were all hurt, injured.”

Peluzzo said that the strong winds completely upended the entire event site within moments, “tables were flying, chairs were flying, the people were all on top of each other. These tents that were put over here, they were flying all over the place.”

First responders arrived to find multiple people suffering from traumatic impact injuries. Urgences-santé deployed a total of five ambulances, three supervisors, and one advanced life support unit to the park.

Samuel Leon, a LaSalle resident living across the street from the park, witnessed a mother desperate for help. “A little girl was carried by her mother. I guess she was running to the car but then the police car was coming and somebody told them that this little girl got hurt. She was out, she was limp so the police took the little girl into their car with the mother and they just raced out of here, I guess, to take her to the hospital.”

“Due to strong wind conditions, the inflatable attraction was lifted and carried by the wind causing multiple traumatic injuries,” Valérie Guertin, Head of Operations at Urgences-Santé.

Emergency crews quickly triaged the victims on-site before executing hospital transfers, “So we have 11 patients that were evaluated by the paramedics and we did six transports to the hospital including four adults and two children. We have one pediatric patient that was transported in critical condition to a pediatric hospital in Montreal,” said Valérie Guertin.

A total of five ambulances, three supervisors and one advanced life support unit were deployed on the scene.

Peluzzo later visited the families to check on the wounded and said there were severe injuries sustained to children and adults. “They were five children, five children, I believe that they were at the hospital. So when I went, there was one of the girls that her lung was bruised the way they fell, right. So she was injured in one of her lungs, the other one critical.”

“There was one child bleeding, he had blood all over his face. One lady, like the pole of this tent went right in her head and she was bleeding all over,” said Peluzzo.

At a press conference Monday, Montreal Mayor, Soraya Martinez Ferrada said her thoughts were with the families involved in the incident.

“My thoughts are with the family,” said Martinez Ferrada. “I mean, you go to an event that has to be festive, probably a birthday or something like that. Then you end up in the hospital. That’s not, I don’t think that was the objective of that day. And so my thoughts are with the family and with that little girl.”

“We have to be careful in terms of using those types of equipment under big winds like we had yesterday,” added Martinez Ferrada.  “It came really fast. And hopefully it’s a good advisement to people to be careful when they use this kind of equipment.”

Power outages

The storm also caused severe outages, majority of outages were reported in the Laurentians, where more than 6,250 households lost power. More than 1,300 customers were affected in Laval, while additional outages were reported in Outaouais and Montérégie.

Hydro-Québec crews were working to restore service, with fallen branches cited as the primary cause of the disruptions.

Authorities continue to investigate the incident as recovery efforts from the storm continue across the region.