Storm systems bring damaging high winds, dust and rain to Manitoba, Saskatchewan

A series of storms that tore through a wide swath of southern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba on Tuesday evening brought high winds and some tornado activity, hail, and more rain.

But in the Brandon area, the storms came with a mouthful of dust.

While actual rainfall in Brandon was negligible – the website weatherstats.ca suggests Brandon received about 2.5 millimetres of precipitation – the city and surrounding communities were overrun with a dust storm shortly after 8 p.m. that darkened the skies and came with wind speeds at the Brandon Airport that reached upwards of 100 kilometres per hour. Several trees around the city were blown over with the high winds, including a large tree that blocked traffic on 18th Street at Rosser Avenue.

Around western Manitoba a post by The Weather Centre of Manitoba reported wind gusts of up to 129 kilometres per hour in Deloraine and Dand, MB south of Hartney, while Ninette clocked in at 109 kilometres per hour, and Souris at 114 kilometres.

There were also multiple tornado sightings across the two prairie provinces, with a large tornado touching down near Oxbow, Sask. on Tuesday evening. Tornados were also spotted near Morris, MB and St. Anne, according to a The Weather Network report.

Manitoba Hydro said there were “widespread” power outages across southern Manitoba as a result of the severe weather, with a post on its social media indicating while crews will respond when it’s safe to do so, given the high number of outages, customers “should be prepared for an overnight outage.

Chris Stammer, a meteorologist with the national forecaster, said most of southern Manitoba was walloped by extreme weather on Tuesday afternoon with severe thunderstorms, hail and strong winds widespread, including in Winnipeg.

Environment Canada issued numerous warnings and watches as the extreme weather rolled into Manitoba around 4 p.m. with the lower half of the province under an orange watch for tornadoes and the communities of Ste. Anne and La Coulée under a red warning due to a “severe thunderstorm that is possibly producing a tornado.”

Winnipeg was also briefly under a red warning for a tornado, but it was cancelled a short while later. Stammer said hail was recorded falling in Winnipeg and between 10 to 20 mm of rain was recorded — as precipitation varied at different parts of the city.

“Folks in Winnipeg, we were kind of getting grazed by the storm, and then the storm actually split and part of it went over the west side of the city, where we had some pretty significant hail, but Winnipeg for now, we’re just seeing some heavy rain with smaller hail.”

Stammer said there were areas south of the city that were hit hard; some hailstones were the size of baseballs, tennis balls and golf balls.

» Brandon Sun & Winnipeg Free Press