At least five tornadoes touched down in southwestern Manitoba on the evening of June 23, leaving trails of devastation.
Two struck between Pipestone and Hartney, and three others were confirmed around Minto and northeast of Killarney. Although a number of farm buildings were damaged and more than 200 power poles fell, only minor injuries were reported.
The storms left much of the southwestern corner of the province without electricity and a Manitoba Hydro spokesperson said that crews would be repairing the damage well into this week.
As the storm was bearing down on them, Bernie Martin and her husband, John, took shelter in the basement of their house, about 10 kilometres west of Hartney.
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At around 8 p.m., the twister tore through the empty cattle shed in their yard and tossed a few other sheds around, but spared their house.
“It was scary,” she said. “It just sounded like a train going through. It quit for a little while, just a few seconds, and then started again. The second time was worse than the first.”
Her sons, Lionel and Claude, who farm nearby, were also hit. Lionel had decided to park his newly leased pickup truck and some machinery in a large shed to protect it from the hail, but the twister toppled the roof onto everything. The baler held up many of the fallen trusses and spared most of the equipment from heavy damage.
“It’s a mess,” she said. To add insult to injury, the storm brought little rain. Instead it brought destructive wind.
She added that Claude now has to keep his cattle off pasture until he can repair some fences that the tornado uprooted.
Ken Atkinson, who lives two km away on the other side of the Souris River, said the tornado missed his yard site by about a kilometre and a half.
In the hills west of the Martins’ farm sites, poplar trees were flattened in a kilometre wide swath “just like they were clear-cut,” he said. The fallen timber has buried a lot of fence, scattering cattle.
“We’re still rounding up. We’ve found calves strewn around with no mothers. I guess they were spooked pretty bad.”
The damage is severe and widespread, he added. About a decade ago, a tornado touched down in his yard, uprooting a few maple trees. But this time it’s much worse.
“We’ve got guys around here who are missing sheds, and sheds piled on top of machinery, bales moved around,” said Atkinson. “I’ve never seen trees smashed like this. We’ve had big winds before, but this is just unreal.”
Lionel Martin said just before the tornado hit, his cattle were visibly upset and trying to get away from the funnel cloud. He may have lost one young calf, possibly because the frantic herd kept crossing the river back and forth.
“I guess they knew the storm was coming and they were trying to get as far south as they could,” he said. “I was scared they were going to go through the fence.”
Dan Kulak, warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada, said that as many as eight tornadoes hit the area last weekend, in addition to the three spotted west of Winnipeg, near Elie.
The twisters there have been rated category F4, which means wind speeds between 333 and 419 km-h. An F5 rating is the maximum.
The funnel that hit the Martins’ farms near Hartney was likely an F3, which means winds between 254 and 332 km-h, he said. However, until investigative teams can survey the damage, the exact category is difficult to determine.
Is this evidence of global warming, or is the proliferation of extreme weather reports complete with on-the-scene video images just making us paranoid?
More likely the latter, said Kulak.
“There was video on YouTube, of all places. Twenty years ago there was no such thing as the cellphone. Now there are people walking around with video cameras built into their phones. We’re just so much more connected these days.”
There may be an increase in incidents, he added, but the verdict will have to come later, once a longer-term picture of a trend, if any, can be assembled.
