UPDATE: Rossburn couple lucky to be alive after tornado hits

A couple from Rossburn, Man., say they are lucky to be alive after a tornado ripped off the southeast corner of their brick home while they were inside it on Sunday evening.

Brian Brown was working in his shop around 7:30 p.m. when it started hailing with thunder and lightning, so he headed for the house.

He was standing near his wife, Bernadine Brown, who was putting clothes in the dryer on the northeast side of the house, when he saw a big tree fall out of the corner of his eye.

“I just yelled at her to get away from the windows, and I grabbed her and threw her on the floor,” Brian said.

The thrash of the tornado had lasted about 10 seconds, he said. It wasn’t until after the tornado had hit that he received a notification about it on his phone, he said.

“When I got up, the room was full of debris. Every picture on the wall, and all the way up the stairs, was down – gone,” Brian said.

“If it had happened half an hour earlier, some of us would be dead and if it happened a couple hours later – if we were in bed – we’d really be dead because that southeast corner is our bedroom.”

Brian said he went to look for clean clothes in his dresser located on the south wall of his bedroom, but he couldn’t find any pieces of it in the rubble.

He and Bernadine are still reeling from the shock of the damage to their home built in 1904. The couple has lived on the farm property since 2004.

While Brian was speaking with the Sun by phone, he pulled one of his cats from some of the rubble that could be heard meowing.

Environment Canada meteorologist Brian Proctor said on Monday morning that at least two tornados had been confirmed in western Manitoba on Sunday evening, with one touching down near Rossburn at 7:30 p.m. Wind gusts of 100 km/h were reported in the area.

A second tornado was reported near Roblin near the Saskatchewan border, but Environment Canada has yet to confirm that, Proctor said.

Barb Inkster was driving west along Highway 16 near Rossburn Sunday evening when she saw the storm beginning to form. She pulled over to take photos as the clouds turned into a funnel.

“As it was moving, it was getting bigger and bigger, and I was just amazed,” she said Monday morning. “I’m sure I was sitting in my car with my mouth open. I have never seen anything like that before.”

The tornado near Rossburn travelled along Highway 264 south of the municipality and damaged two homes in its path. No one was home at the time and there have been no injuries reported, deputy mayor Adam Grabowski said.

Grabowski said he expects there to be damage to crops in the area, based on videos he’s seen of the storm, and its location.

The Northern Tornadoes Project, established in 2017 to better detect tornado activity in Canada, is surveying the damage from the storm and will report its findings to Environment Canada, Proctor said. No information about the severity of the tornado was available Monday morning.

Grabowski said tornadoes are not common in the municipality, which is home to about 1,000 people. The last one in recent memory was in 2016, when a tornado damaged a home in Waywayseecappo First Nation, about 10 kilometres west of Rossburn.

“This year of weather has been odd,” he said. “The amount of severe thunderstorms we have seen, it is concerning to think, ‘What do we have to prepare for?’”

Road 143W is closed between 108N and 109N until further notice, the municipality said on social media.

Elsewhere, Highway 593, from highways 484 to 83, is closed due to road washouts.

The Brandon Sun has a photographer on scene in Rossburn, and a reporter following this story.

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