‘Wall of wind’ hits Clear Lake

Hundreds of homes and businesses were left without power after a storm ripped through the Clear Lake area Monday evening, knocking down trees and scattering debris.

Crews removed fallen trees on Tuesday, and power was mostly restored in the Wasagaming and Onanole areas by Tuesday afternoon, Manitoba Hydro said.

Sandra Shwetz, owner of The Boardwalk on Clear Lake, said it was a calm evening before the storm hit all at once.

“All of a sudden, just like a wall of wind hit — it just came up like I’ve never seen before,” Shwetz said. “There’s so much rain and tree debris flying around. It was hard to see anything.”

Shwetz said about 30 people spent up to half an hour inside her shop during the storm. One person who went to their car during the storm had to “fight the door” because of the heavy winds.

She said the storm, which cast “sideways rain,” caught many people by surprise as alerts didn’t appear on their phones.

Power was only out for about 20 minutes at her shop, Shwetz said, and was back on all day Tuesday.

Jan Sullivan, who lives about four kilometres east of Wasagaming, said her power went out Monday evening and only came back briefly on Tuesday morning. Aside from that, she said her area wasn’t affected.

When she drove into town Tuesday, she saw a lot of park employees with chainsaws cleaning up the mess.

“In our area some trees had fallen on the power line,” Sullivan said. “It was quite a storm, really high winds and everything. Around our place we just had a lot of twigs and branches.”

Manitoba Hydro media relations officer Peter Chura said the storm caused “significant amounts of damage to hydro lines” as trees and branches fell.

“Our crews worked through the night to repair damage and restore power, but in some cases had to wait for conditions to improve and specialized equipment to arrive,” Chura said in an email Tuesday.

“Additional crews from Dauphin and Russell arrived (Tuesday) morning.”

Chura said that people who see a downed power line should stay back at least 10 metres and call emergency services.

Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Crawford Luke said two storms — one from Roblin and another from Russell — combined just west of Riding Mountain National Park and proceeded to “kind of just collapse” over the communities.

“It looks like it would have been a pretty strong downburst or straight-line wind,” he said.

“It’s basically when a thunderstorm has a really strong downdraft and a bunch of air rushes to the ground. When it hits the ground, it kind of goes splat and kind of surges out in all directions.”

Luke said it’s something that happens a few times during the summer months across the country, and that it’s not out of the ordinary.

He said this time of year is normally when extreme weather events start to wind down, but that we aren’t out of the clear just yet.

“We’ve had Septembers in the past where we still had some hail storms or tornadoes even. All that being said, we’re certainly at the time of year where it does start to wind down pretty quickly.”

There’s a chance another thunderstorm will hit early next week, Luke said, but “it doesn’t look particularly active” over the rest of the season.

» alambert@brandonsun.com