NINGA, Man. – Robert Smith heard the wind come up at 3 a.m. Aug. 27 and looked out the window in time to see his machine shed blow away.
By the time he reached his basement, the most vicious wind and hailstorm to hit this area in recent memory was over.
“Five minutes after, it was dead calm. The stars were shining and the moon was out,” said Smith last week. “It was an eerie feeling.
“The destruction is just incredible,” he said as he surveyed the contents of his farmyard spread out over a radius of about half a kilometre.
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Residents of an area nearly 60 km long and 16 km wide between Elgin, Man. and the Killarney area were still picking up wreckage and assessing the damage last week.
Storms over the past three weeks have pulverized thousands of acres of crops between Pilot Mound, Deloraine and Souris. Farmers in the Clearwater and Mather areas of the province have seen three violent hailstorms in as many weeks.
“You know what a carpet floor is like? That’s how high the crop is,” said John Park, the Manitoba Crop Insurance Corporation agent in Deloraine.
Grain bins and buildings have been destroyed. The Ninga elevator will be out of commission for several weeks while its roof is repaired.
There are no reports of livestock killed, but producers reported injuries to horses on pasture that panicked and ran into fences, Boissevain agricultural representative Susan Markus said.
Smith said calves on his farm were bloodied by the intensity of the tennis-ball sized hailstones hammering their backs.
Park said the problem facing farmers now is what to do with the severely damaged fields: they may be used for pasture, burned, or tilled
