ELIE, Man. – It looks like a freight train skipped the tracks behind the Prairie Flour Mills plant, smashed up the facility and dragged debris along a careening course that roared right through town.
But it’s a train wreck that left no tracks to follow, because the sound many local people heard June 22 was actually a tornado whipping through the area.
No one was killed but dozens of homes were damaged, four destroyed, and the Prairie Flour Mills facilities and vehicles were battered.
Dale Williamson, general manager of the mill, spent most of the weekend organizing the cleanup of his plant.
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“It took out the drive shed, the bran bin and a couple of the wheat storage bins as well as that bagging warehouse,” said Williamson, as he sorted through the strewn wreckage.
Although his facility is the only structure for about a kilometre, some of the debris comes from elsewhere, dropped when the tornado’s centrifugal forces were momentarily overpowered the suction of its vortex.
The Elie tornado appeared at 6:25 p.m. north of the Trans-Canada Highway, blew a semi-trailer off the road, drilled into the flour mill and carried on through the town.
Other tornadoes appeared in the region that night near Headingley, Oakville and Carman.
Other wild storms battered Manitoba over the weekend, with destruction across the province.
Williamson said on a normal Friday night people would have been working at the mill when the tornado struck, but workers made a decision two weeks ago to move the overnight packaging from a Monday to Friday shift to a Sunday to Thursday operation.
A number of crops in the area were flattened by the twister, but that won’t be the farmers’ worst problem. The tornado dropped lots of heavy metal and wooden objects that are now lying in the fields, a danger to farm equipment.
“I wouldn’t want to try to harvest that field,” said one emergency worker about the metal in the cropland behind him.
