Anne Raynor was unusually calm this morning, considering she nearly died last night.
Raynor and her husband, Fred, who farm near Tilston, Man., were sitting at the kitchen table of their farmhouse around 8:30 p.m. when the sky turned “black as coal.”
Moments later the phone rang.
Violent storm rocks Manitoba, including tornado
“My daughter was coming here and she phoned. She said, ‘get in your basement, there’s a funnel cloud over the house,’ ” Anne said Tuesday, the morning after a tornado ripped across southwestern Manitoba, destroying farm buildings and flattening crops in its path.
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Raynor took her daughter’s advice and went into the basement of their bungalow. Fred decided to weather the storm upstairs.
“My husband stayed up. He wouldn’t come down. He said the walls … were just shaking on the house,” said Raynor, who spoke in a composed tone during a telephone interview this morning.
“The wind was coming from every direction…. It would come from one direction and then (shift) to the other direction.”
About an hour later the intense winds died down and the Raynors went outside to survey the damage.
“It was calm as anything…. Then the storm watchers came here and said get in your truck and go south (in case) it comes back,” Raynor said.
“We took off and (went) to my daughter’s place.”
The Raynors spent the night at their daughter’s home and returned to their farm this morning.
The damage was hard to miss. The twister destroyed a machine shed, the cattle shed and corrals, knocked over grain bins and picked up a chicken coop.
“I had a big chicken house, full of little chickens. It took the whole house, chickens and everything,” Raynor said.
“Three hundred (chickens). They were about a month old. We gathered up about 50 of them…. And (round) bales right off the fields. At one end (of the field) they just disappeared. They must of rolled into the slough or something.”
While the damage is significant, Raynor wasn’t particularly angry or upset.
“We’re feeling lucky that we’re here.”
Greg Johnson, a professional storm chaser and star of the Tornado Hunters television show, said it’s amazing that no lives or homes were lost in this twister.
Johnson was chasing the storm across southwestern Manitoba last night. He said this tornado was spectacular and one of the most “violent” he’s ever seen.
“This, I’m going to guess, will end up being the tornado of the year in North America. It’s certainly the biggest one that’s been recorded so far (in 2015) and visually the most impressive,” he said.
“As far as Canadian tornadoes, this would be, by far, my favourite…. The most impressive.”
Johnson said last night’s tornado was extraordinary because it stayed on the ground for so long. His team tracked the twister for 40 minutes. Other reports suggest it was on the ground for 2.5 hours.
“It was what we refer to as a ‘long track’ tornado, meaning it was on the ground and doing its thing for a long period of time,” he said.
“Less than one percent of tornadoes would be long-track tornadoes. Most last a few minutes or less.”
Johnson said most long-track tornadoes cause severe damage to homes and humans.
“It’s extremely luck y… (that) there’s a low population density in that area (southwestern Manitoba),” he said. “If that exact same tornado … would have happened pretty much anywhere in Oklahoma or Texas, it would have hit something.”
robert.arnason@producer.com
