SASKATOON – A series of violent storms ravaged farms near Saskatoon last week, damaging crops, destroying bins and buildings and leaving milk producers near Osler, Sask. in a precarious position.
“These are the kind of things that are tougher on a dairy farmer, because you have to go,” said Wilf Buehler, whose feed room collapsed when a powerful wind knocked the walls out and the roof collapsed.
While other farmers can clean up the damage and figure out the costs at their leisure, dairy producers must milk their cows or the animals will suffer great pain and injury. Buehler said some of his neighbors were hit harder than he was, losing homes, barns and milking equipment.
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“If you look out in the field it looks like sheep grazing, but it’s pieces of granaries and quonsets,” he said.
A wide range of storms bubbled in a weather cauldron last week stretching from Maymont to Saskatoon to Osler. In Maymont, a tornado tore a jagged strip through local farms. On one it picked up a grain truck and carried it into a house 30 metres away. One witness reported seeing five twisters at one time.
In the Saskatoon area, 140 km-h winds and pounding rain flooded land and lacerated some crops, also damaging many trees.
In the city itself, damage appears to have come from a plow wind, a solid wall of wind that roars straight along in one direction. Osler’s damage also appears to be the work of a plow wind, although the damage around there suggests the first plow wind was followed by others from different directions.
Steve Knott, of Environment Canada, said the combination of intense heat and humidity created good conditions for violent weather, and the nearby “jet stream was like a spark that lit the flame.”
The storm tops rose to 66,000 feet, which Knot said is more typical of severe weather in Kansas and Oklahoma than the Canadian Prairies.
Storms ravage central Saskatchewan
