The tornado which hit Canada's capital, Ottawa, on Friday, cracked big trees, blew cars into the air and knocked down houses.

In footage of the storm, people cry out in fear and excitement, as everything around them is carried away by the wind.

One of the people interviewed, James Witter, wept and described how his little daughter was almost torn from his arms by the storm. First, the wind blew the roof off his house, and he then found himself holding as tightly as he could onto his daughter so she wouldn’t fly away too.

“I said, if she’s gonna die, I’m gonna die with her,” he recalled, sobbing in an interview with NBC News.

The storm crossed areas in the west and south of Ottawa, as well as neighboring city Gatineau.

Dozens of people were injured. The Ottawa hospital tweeted that two people had been hospitalized in critical condition and two others were in stable condition, but nobody had as yet been killed and there were no missing persons.

On Saturday afternoon there were still 150,000 residents without electricity. The last time similar damage was done was in 1998, when an ice storm raged in the area.

The mayor of Gatineau said that more than 15 buildings had been damaged in the storm.