Tornado aftermath: Farmer trying to pick up the pieces

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This article was published 12/08/2020 (2059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Despite everything that has happened, Giovanni Colangelo is trying to stay positive after a massive tornado, measuring EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, cut right through his property this past Friday.

The 60-year-old farmer recently told the Sun that while he has got over the initial shock of seeing most of his grain bins torn to shreds by winds that reached up to 190 kilometres per hour, he still has a lot of work to do for the upcoming harvest.

“I lost about 110,000 bushels worth of storage space,” he said on Tuesday. “One bushel, on average, costs between three to five dollars. So you do the math.”

Still, Colangelo said he’s in a much better state of mind compared to when the tornado first touched down near his property approximately 16 kilometres south of Virden around 8 p.m. Friday.

While the farmer was a safe distance away from his property when the twister hit, he was still powerless to stop the storm from uprooting trees, battering his storage bins and filling his yard and surrounding wheat fields with various debris.

“I didn’t get any sleep that night,” Colangelo said. “At two o’clock, I couldn’t stay in bed anymore and I came into the yard, and that was the worst five to six hours of my life.”

Luckily, as the day went on, Colangelo discovered that he didn’t have to tackle the cleanup alone.

Not only did his neighbours drop by to lend some moral support, but approximately 50 members of a Mennonite church group from nearby Cromer eventually showed up with some heavy machinery to help clear away the wreckage.

“By seven o’clock at night, we had most of the yard cleaned, and we were walking through the field and picked up all the pieces,” he said. “We walked for about two miles and got five to six piles of debris. It was a gigantic job, but it did give me some hope.”

However, Colangelo doesn’t hold any illusions about the struggle that’s ahead of him.

With a lot of his grain-storage capabilities crippled, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to financially recover from this severe weather incident, especially given his age.

“I’m going to need to have a miracle,” he said. “But then again, I do have a chance to do it.”

Colangelo has been farming on this stretch of land near the community of Scarth for the last 40 years, having immigrated to Manitoba from his native Italy with several other members of his family.

“Back then I was working with my father and my brother,” he said. “We started out like any farm, more or less, renting. Eventually, we bought (the property) and we got it to this point.”

Even though Colangelo said the tornado blew away 25 years worth of progress on his farm, he’s still trying to keep things in perspective, especially since a young couple from Melita, Shayna Barnesky and Carter Tilbury, were killed in the tornado.

“I’m still here, still able to work,” he said. “Bins can be rebuilt. Life cannot.”

In a followup email to the Sun, Colangelo wanted to thank some additional individuals for helping clean up his land.

This includes members of Valleyview Co-op for supplying diesel fuel for their equipment and “the Cromer ladies for bringing pizza at lunch time for the workers.”

On top of offering his deepest sympathies to the families of Barnesky and Tilbury, Colangelo also wished a speedy recovery to James Blacksmith, the 54-year-old man from Sioux Valley Dakota Nation who was injured in Friday’s tornado.

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