SPRING VALLEY, Sask. – A father and his four sons are lucky to be alive after three fingers reached down from the fist of a storm and tore a path across their land near Spring Valley.
The Beitels were working in the field when the wild storm hit at about 6:40 p.m. Aug. 29.
Two sons were out loading oats when their father, Lloyd Beitel, ran over the hill shouting and pointing.
“You could just see a big black cloud coming from the west,” said 20-year-old Todd. “By the time we got to the house (about a half kilometre away) she’d hit.”
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They were lucky.
Brother Shaun, caught in the path of the speeding tornado and unable to get back to the house, leapt out of the tractor cab and started running. His father raced up to him in a half-ton, grabbed onto him and tested his strength against the storm in a tug of war for Shaun as the windows were blown out and Shaun was nearly sucked out.
In the summerfallow field, Wade Beitel saw the tornado coming and dropped onto the only floor he could find – the tractor’s. He held onto the clutch pedal and managed to stay down.
They couldn’t see him anywhere when Lloyd and Shaun drove up in their battered truck after the tornadoes passed. “They thought he’d been taken off by the storm. But then he peeked his head out,” said Todd.
No one in the Beitel family was seriously injured, a remarkable fact shared by the other smashed farms and homes in the valley.
When the tornadoes first touched down on the west side of the valley, the Kelly home was pulverized. But even though they were upstairs when the tornado struck and the roof was ripped completely off, Claudette Kelly and her son stayed safe in a corner while the funnel cloud moved on.
Equipment destroyed
The tornadoes whizzed along eastwards, causing random damage, until they hit the Beitel farm. There they destroyed a combine, a swather, a baler, a tractor, some harrows and stock trailers. The tornadoes ripped their way across more than 15 kilometres of farmland.
Damage at the Kelly and Beitel farms is immense, but in a testament to the tornado’s perverse focus of destruction, there is very little serious crop damage along the twisters’ paths.
John Kelly, whose barn and quonset along with cattle pens simply disappeared in the howling winds, said he’s going to have to sell his 35 cows and move into Moose Jaw for the winter.
Todd Beitel said his family’s main concern now is just getting their crop harvested. With no equipment left that might be difficult, although he said many local people and an Avonlea equipment dealership have offered to help.
“We’re just worrying about getting the harvest dealt with. The cattle are next,” he said, laughing about the appearance of the cows after they miraculously survived being caught in the tornado.
“They came out looking like Angus cows – and they were Charolais,” he said.
Todd said he hadn’t had much time to figure out why no one in the family was killed or seriously injured, other than just chalk it up to “real good luck.”
