A southern Ontario town spent its Saturday cleaning up after a tornado and thanking its lucky stars the Friday event didn't kill anyone.

"If you look at the shop, it's just unbelievable that somebody actually came out of there," Jack Thalen, who runs a piano repair business behind his home in Fergus, Ont., said on Saturday.

The building housing the business doesn't exist any more.

Dwight Pile, who was working in the shop, said: "At a certain point, we decided this was getting a little serious, so we all moved to the centre of the room. And about five seconds later, the building basically exploded."

He described the chaos: "About seven uprights and three grand pianos flying all over the place plus all the drill presses and all the different projectiles.

"My co-worker was forced under a grand piano, and that saved his life."

"The building just fell apart around me, and I stayed put," said Adrian Dyck, the man who hid under that piano.

A nearby home had its roof ripped off. The tornado also tore apart a barn.

As one more example of how lucky people were than show matters could have been worse, the storm blew through a summer camp, leaving 21 children huddled in the main dining hall.

"We are very fortunate all our kids are safe, all our staff, no injuries whatsoever," said Sherri Whitehead, the YMCA's camp director.

"I think today would be much more stressful if we were wondering how people were surviving," said Russ Spicer, mayor of  Centre Wellington, a municipality that includes Fergus.

Two tornadoes

"We've confirmed at this location a Fujita scale F2 tornado occurred, with winds between 180 to 240 kilometres an hour," said Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson on Saturday.

"That's confirmed with the damage that we've witnessed."

Some of the damage could even be indicative of an F3 tornado -- meaning winds of between 240 and 300 km/hr, he said.

Cornfields were flattened, hay bales tossed around and trees damaged.

Later Saturday, Environment Canada said a second twister formed just north of Fergus, also an F2. Both tornadoes were about 300 metres wide where they touched down.

Officials declared a state of emergency in Centre Wellington on Friday.

Hydro One officials said 4,400 people were left without power in Fergus and surrounding areas. They hoped to have that power restored by Saturday evening.

Toronto

The extreme weather also hit northern parts of Toronto on Friday afternoon as intense thunderstorm cells moved through the area.

The heavy rains caused flash flooding and left many major roadways impassable. One road in the city's northwest completely washed out, causing about $1 million in damages.

Toronto firefighters had to carry out an emergency rescue of one man caught in the flooding waters of the city's Don River -- one of 1,700 calls to the city's emergency services.

And with hundreds of flooded basements, many Torontonians will be spending the dying days of summer drying and cleaning out their properties.

With a report from CTV's Denelle Balfour