‘Everything’s up in the air’: farmer flabbergasted after tornado takes out barn near Elkhorn

Kelvin Siemens hoped he was dreaming when a tornado touched down near his home Sunday evening.

When he woke up the next morning, the southwestern Manitoba farmer confirmed it was no dream, as his barn and hay shed was toppled and a pile of rubble was left behind.

“This kind of devastation can really test your constitution,” Siemens, 65, told the Free Press from his farm just south of Kola, a small community in the Rural Municipality of Wallace-Woodworth.

The tornado was reported near Elkhorn, about 105 kilometres west of Brandon, at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday. A second tornado touched down near Maryfield, Sask., located southwest of Elkhorn.

Siemens spent Monday getting tools, electronics and other valuables out of the rainy weather, trying to reach an insurance agent, and cleaning up scattered wood and tin strewn about by the winds.

It’s bad, but not all bad: the family home was somehow left virtually untouched, and what he describes as the “various sundry of animals” on the farm are all safe and accounted for.

“We will move on, but in what way, shape or form remains to be determined,” he said. “I’m going to be 66 this fall, so that factor may play in… everything’s up in the air.”

A number of Manitoba communities experienced heavy rain on Sunday: as of 6 a.m. Monday, there was a recorded 73.8 millimetres of rainfall in Kola, 37.8 millimetres in Duck Mountain, 55.8 millimetres in San Clara and 41.2 millimetres in St. Lazare.

The heavy storms and winds were caused by a frontal passage, when two separate air masses move over the same location, said Stephen Berg, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“(It was) a pretty active system, that’s for sure,” Berg said Monday.

The weather agency issued a tornado warning in Wallace-Woodworth and some surrounding areas Sunday.

Environment Canada was monitoring strong winds Monday that could reach the southwest corner of Manitoba, including the communities of Melita and Virden, Berg said.

“There might be wind gusts that could exceed 80 kilometres per hour, we’ll have to keep watch for that,” he said.

“That might be an issue in terms of the fragile soils that are present with all that rain, so trees and power poles might be a bit more susceptible to being bent over from the wind.”

The severity rating of both twisters is still being determined pending further investigation by the Northern Tornadoes Project, a Canadian research initiative that studies tornado activity.

Dylan Painchaud-Niemi, a research meteorologist with the group, was headed out to survey the damage Monday afternoon.

There have been 11 confirmed tornadoes in Manitoba this year. That’s above average, Painchaud-Niemi said.

“Every year it can fluctuate, but we have been getting, say, seven to nine tornadoes every year,” he said.

While one year can’t determine a trend, the Northern Tornadoes Project is studying how climate change could have an impact.

“What we do expect to happen is as the climate warms, that we’ll have a warmer season starting earlier and ending later,” Painchaud-Niemi said. “So we do expect that the tornado season will become longer as the climate warms.”

Manitoba’s summer has been marked with torrential rain, destructive winds and other severe weather events. In June, thousands were left without power after two tornadoes touched down in Ste. Anne and Dufrost, and a month’s worth of rain flooded Stonewall and other areas in southern Manitoba.

On June 28, a tornado tore through Brian and Bernadine Brown’s 102-year-old brick farmhouse south of Rossburn.

The retired couple, who are now renting a home in the community, are still recovering from that day. When they received tornado alerts on their phones Sunday evening, they were struck with anxiety over the possibility of having to face another bout of extreme weather.

“The minute we heard tornadoes again, we thought, ‘Please, not two in a row, there’s no way that they’re going to hit us twice,’ that’s the first thing you’re thinking,” she said.

“And secondly, is (we were) very anxious … we were looking around trying to plan in our heads where the safest place would be, should this happen again.”

With the home they expected to spend their retirement years in destroyed, they’re considering moving to Winnipeg, closer to family and possibly into an apartment or assisted living facility.

Their family, friends and community have been there for them, and they’re grateful, Brown said, but she feels for the people impacted by Sunday’s storm because she knows they have a long road ahead.

“We had a plan for renovating the house, we were going on with our life, and we were happy. We were doing everything we wanted to do, and we were enjoying what we were doing. It all changed,” she said.

“And now we’re just figuring out the best plan for the reality we are in today.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca