The tornado that touched down near Highway 83 and Road 50N in the RM of Pipestone, approximately 16 kilometers south of Virden Friday August 7 was on the ground for 16 minutes rotating southeast at 30 km/h toward Oak Lake Beach and Deleau.
In that time it caused the unspeakable tragedy of taking the lives of two young people Shayna Barnesky and Carter Tilbury and injuring a 54-year-old man from the Sioux Valley Dakota First Nation.
The tornado also did considerable damage to a farm and power lines.
Manitoba Storm Chaser Jordon Carruthers was following this storm from Fleming before it became a tornado.
“It was probably the most perfect tornado a lot of people have ever seen. It was straight out of a meteorology textbook,” said Carruthers, who has been chasing storms for over a decade.
Predicting the storm
Carruthers’ Friday started how any storm chaser’s work day starts—he checked the weather.
“What we study is basically the same models that meteorologists will use to put together a forecast. There are 15 to 20 different models that all have their pros and cons for how accurate they are on certain parameters. Usually we will pick five or six out of the 20 that we know are usually very accurate in certain areas. What we do is we take a good look through all of those, find and tick off the similarities between them and that is what we use to pick our target,” said Carruthers.
With their prediction made, Carruthers and his team headed to Fleming Saskatchewan.
50 kilometers separates Fleming, where Carruthers predicted the storm would form, to where the tornado touched down south of Virden.
“I actually had targeted Fleming Saskatchewan. That storm ended up firing up just to the south of Moosomin tracking east so I was with the storm from Fleming all the way to Verdin. (The storm) still pretty much happened exactly where I thought it would happen. When we pick a target, we are never going to be bang on right where it fires off, but we try to be within a 20 to 30 minute drive so we can see the clouds going up and turning into severe storms. From that distance, if there are multiple cells forming, we can pick which one is the highest up, which one looks the strongest and from there we can pick one storm and chase it,” said Carruthers.
Reporting the perfect storm
Although storm chasers like Carruthers are always on the lookout for tornados, they chase all severe storms.
“We’ll basically chase any severe storm because even if it doesn’t produce a tornado you can still get really strong, damaging winds or hail that we report. We will chase even if there is little to no chance of a tornado out there,” said Carruthers.
When the storm moved away from Fleming, Carruthers followed.
“Storms will always travel in an eastward direction. (In Fleming) We were just east of the storm and we just kind of let it come to us as it was building and then we tagged along with it to Virden and then eventually where it dropped the tornado,” said Carruthers.
He stopped in Virden for gas while waiting for the storm to catch up, and that is when it became clear something was about to happen.
“This was a very unique storm. Most storms will go through cycling phases where they get stronger and they get weaker, but there were three different things at play on this storm where everything lined up perfectly. There was a warm front to the northeast that was moving away from the storm leaving warm air in the area that the storm was in and then there was a pocket of heavy dew points where a lot of moisture and humidity was streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico that was also positioning right in that same spot and there was a cold front coming in behind the storm. All three these things combined perfectly in this spot and strengthened the storm and caused it to start rotating,” said Carruthers.
At the gas station as Carruthers saw the rotations, he got on the phone with Environment Canada. While he was waiting for them to answer he heard the emergency warning. This meant that a fellow storm chaser got a hold of the agency and the warning went out as early as possible.
For Carruthers, it soon became clear that this was going to be a storm to see.
“I was mind blown. I have seen quite a few tornados and not a single one of them was this photogenic and perfectly formed as that one. I was going ‘holy cow am I actually seeing this?’ It was straight out of a movie,” said Carruthers.
The feeling of awe turned back to business as they followed the storm south.
“From the gas station we continued south on Highway 83 to get out of the path because it was tracking towards us. So we wanted to get south of it because it was traveling in a northeast direction. We drove another three miles south and stopped on the side of Highway 83 about half a mile from where the tornado was. We got out of the vehicle and started videotaping and taking pictures of it. We saw the funnel fully connect down to the ground. Tear through that farm yard, cross the highway into the field across the road and weakened off and disappeared into thin air,” said Carruthers.
The wake of the storm
For all the tragedy and damage it caused, the tornado existed just over a quarter of an hour.
“Total time from when we first started seeing ground rotation (the dust and dirt getting picked up underneath the tornado) till the time it lifted off the ground was approximately 16 minutes,” said Carruthers.
In that short time the unspeakable happened as two you people lost their lives and another man was injured. Carruthers and his crew leapt into action the moment the it was safe to do so.
“First thing we did was drive to the farm yard. We started searching for anybody that was injured. Looking through debris and yelling around asking ‘Is anybody here?’ The man that was injured, we found him trapped in his vehicle and we saw the white pick up truck that the two 18-year-olds were in, sitting out in the field. We ran out to it and couldn’t find anybody. We hoped that it was just a parked vehicle that came from the yard. We were on the phone with 9-1-1, waiting for emergency workers to get there, letting them know that there is someone trapped in their vehicle,” said Carruthers.
Thanks in part to the 9-1-1 call, it was not long before emergency service workers showed up.
“We decided to just get out of emergency services’ way and continue home. We were on our way home when we heard the news of the deaths,” said Carruthers.
The sad outcome of this tornado just brought it back to everyone just how quickly a storm can become dangerous and even life threatening.
“Don’t lose faith in the warning systems. I know a lot of times there are tornado warnings and nothing happens, so people start ignoring them. Always heed the warning,” said Carruthers.
Power down
The tornado did damage to a farm house and also 20 power line poles leaving people in the area without electricity.
Manitoba Hydro was on the case moments after the tornado was gone.
“After the tornado we activated an Emergency Operation Centre in Brandon to co-ordinate repairs. This involved a call-out to 29 local and neighbouring Manitoba Hydro staff and their equipment from Virden, Morden, Brandon, Neepawa and Portage. We got the first outage reports shortly after 8 p.m. Friday, affecting 135 customers. All but five were restored by 11:30 p.m. Friday. The remaining five customers were restored by mid-afternoon Saturday after approximately 20 damaged poles were replaced,” said Bruce Owen, Media Relations Officer for Manitoba Hydro.
Other damage included several kilometers of power lines, plus associated hardware like insulators and transformers.
“On Saturday we asked property owners in the affected area to contact us if they found our hardware on their property, as of this afternoon, we have not had any calls from the public regarding material that may have gone missing Friday night. We have staff out today at cleaning up damaged material,” said Owen
“I can add the tornado touched down in a rural area, and missed critical transmission infrastructure and substations, limiting the amount of damage,” said Owen.
