Hail and strong winds Thursday night left a south-central Manitoba family’s farm and homestead covered with branches and wreckage.
“My wife said ‘you better get out here,’ and it started hailing,” said Kevin Funk.
“Branches and hail were hitting the windows. At one point it felt like a vacuum inside the house, and it went quiet, and I thought the windows were going to explode.”
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Funk is a farm-to-table chef and caterer. His family lives near Darlingford in south-central Manitoba.
The storm partially destroyed the family’s carport, the siding and shingles on their house, flipped a pheasant coop, destroyed chicken housing, and lifted the roof off a pole barn, depositing it about 100 feet away.
“It just took off like a parachute,” Funk said.
The storm and hail also heavily damaged the family’s garden, which grows food for the business and the family.
Funk attributed some of the damage to a plow wind — a strong, straight-line wind associated with outflow from strong thunderstorms, according to the American Meteorological Society.
He said the damage seemed fairly localized, though one neighbor had reported a field of wheat was destroyed by hail.
Severe weather across the province
A swath of southern Manitoba and portions of the northwest saw rain, high winds and hail Thursday night, Environment Canada reports show. Tornado warnings were also issued over the southwest on the evening of July 3, though no tornadoes had been reported as of Friday morning.
Wind gusts up to 115 kilometres per hour were reported at Dand and Hartney in the southwest corner of the province. Cartwright saw gusts up to 107 km/h, Killarney reported 85 km/h winds, while Environment Canada reported 76 km/h wind gusts at Zhoda in the southeast corner of Manitoba.
Portions of the northwest also saw severe weather, with a report of tennis ball-sized hail at Big Island near Flin Flon. Wind gusts up to 89 km/h were reported at Pukatawagen.
As of Friday morning, 44 millimeters of rain were reported at Dand, 45 mm at Letellier and 46 mm at Altona in south-central Manitoba, and 42 mm at Zhoda. Environment Canada reported 65 mm of rain at Windygates near the U.S. border.
