Wild weather

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This article was published 04/08/2016 (3580 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba was cleaning up Thursday after severe weather whipped some areas of southern Manitoba with two tornadoes, loonie-sized hail, wind gusts up to 111 kilometres per hour and rainfall amounts of up to 100 millimetres.

A pair of tornadoes was confirmed, with the largest of the two at 5:20 p.m., Wednesday about 20 km west of Baldur. It destroyed a shed as it moved towards Glenboro.

“I heard this hell of a crash, and I looked out and seen my shed just take off,” said Shawn McPhail. He hadn’t heard the weather warnings coming across the radio on the way home from work Wednesday, but he definitely didn’t miss the crunch of a tornado ripping through his shelterbelt and sheep shed.

The 2,400-square-foot shed collapsed on 150 sheep inside. While none of McPhail’s herd was hurt, he has been left a big mess to clean up.

Environment Canada meteorologist Jason Knight said a smaller tornado was reported near Margaret, Man., at 5:10 p.m., which didn’t last very long, with no damage reported. There have been no injuries reported from either tornado.

“The most significant event of the day was that tornado that formed west of Baldur. It went just west of Glenboro by Stockton where it destroyed a rather large machine shed,” Knight said. “It continued northeast to Spruce Woods Provincial Park. It was probably on the ground for 30 minutes or so, and we’re investigating further to get more details on that today.”

He said it is not confirmed whether the tornado affected the provincial park itself because that area is sparsely populated.

In Winnipeg, football fans waited 2½ hours Wednesday evening for the Blue Bombers to start their CFL game as lightning lit up the sky.

The storm also left Manitoba Hydro crews scrambling Thursday to restore power to about 1,100 customers in southern Manitoba.

Hydro spokesman Scott Powell said some areas were hit “very hard.” Hydro tweeted Morden received the worst damage: seven hydro poles were being replaced, 10 were being straightened and crews are repairing downed conductors and clearing downed trees.

All of the main feeder and substation lines in the area were working again by Thursday afternoon, and crews were addressing individual calls for service.

Hydro work was continuing in Carman and the Interlake area. The power line from Pointe du Bois was out and was affecting the Bird Lake area.

Most of the outages in and around Steinbach were addressed by Thursday afternoon, leaving about 120 customers — 75 of them in Niverville — without power, Powell said, adding crews are re-stringing downed wires and repairing blown transformers, and things were hoped to be back to normal Thursday evening.

In Brandon, loonie-sized hail occurred at about 6 p.m. while Wasagaming also had loonie-sized hail at 10:10 p.m. Quarter-sized hail fell at Shoal Lake at 9:20 p.m.

Wind was most intense at Morden where winds gusted up to 111 km/h at 7:26 p.m. There were gusting winds of up to 93 km/h at Portage la Prairie at 7:10 p.m., 92 km/h at St. Adolphe at 9:05 p.m., 85 km/h at Gretna at 7:46 p.m. and 74 km/h at Winnipeg’s Richardson International Airport at 9:45 p.m.

Erickson was deluged with 104 mm of rain. In the Westman area, 75 mm of rain fell on Neepawa, while Glenboro had 66 mm of rain. Winnipeg reported minimal rainfall amounts of 2.7 mm at The Forks and 1.4 mm at the airport.

Other locations with heavy rainfall amounts included St. Adolphe with 64 mm, while 50 mm to 56 mm was measured in Holland, Ethelbert, Fisherton, Morden and Killarney.

“Quite a large area in the southern Red River Valley got 30 to 60 millimetres,” Knight said.

If it feels like this is a wet and wild summer so far, Knight said, because it is, and there are data to back that up.

“This seems like a very busy summer. We’re going to be collecting more stats on that for sure by the end of August and correlating although some of the numbers, I’m sure, are going to be very impressive, especially the rainfall totals. We’re quite frequently seeing numbers in the 100-mm range both in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, so it’s been a very wet summer.”

Anyone with further information on Wednesday’s weather can make a report to Environment Canada by calling 1-800-239-0484, send an email to storm@ec.gc.ca, or tweet with the hashtag #MBStorm.

Knight said a measurement of the ferocity of Wednesday’s tornadoes can be determined only after investigators judge the sturdiness of the structure, the kind of foundation it was on and other damage in the area.

The tornado July 20 that destroyed property on Long Plain First Nation, including lifting a house off its foundation and moving it about eight kilometres, has been tentatively listed as an EF 1 (enhanced Fujita scale). The investigation is continuing, and it could still be classified as an EF 2.

Knight said the cause of Wednesday’s widespread wild weather in southern Manitoba was an intense low-pressure system tracking across the Prairies.

“You can still see part of it (this morning) over the Manitoba Interlake right now, and it’s finally going to push off into Ontario later in the day,” Knight said Thursday. “It was very intense for this time of the year, very compact system, too, which helped increase the intensity. That generated widespread severe weather across southern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba and heavy rain in many locations and all sorts of other severe thunderstorm weather as well.”

— with files from Alexandra De Pape, Brandon Sun

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca