Sometimes I wonder if we have too much information at our hands these days. Remember the days when you would blissfully get in your car and drive, even if the weather report said it was stormy? Either the road was shut down (which almost never, ever happened in my memory) or you went, and toughed it through.
Now we have the Highway Hotline, available via phone call or online. We can look up the weather radar on our smart phones and see if that cloud on the horizon just looks scary, or actually is scary.
This was the case July 13. My wife and I were returning from our holidays at the lake when, as luck would have it, I had a client ask if I could swing by and do a photo shoot at their farm near Arcola. On the way there, coming from Manitoba, we could see big, ominous clouds, and a fair bit of lightning. Out came the iPhone. Sure enough, the weather forecast for the Carlyle area was for severe thunderstorms. But a look at the radar was jarring, to say the least. There was a large, circular storm cell centred over Griffin and Stoughton, with colours on the spectrum you generally don't ever want to see. This storm was heading straight down Highway 13, where my client's farm was situated. We would later find out that this storm wacked Griffin hard with hail.
We stopped for a bite to eat in Carlyle, looking west to see the 4 p.m. sky blacken over Arcola. I contacted the clients, and they texted back, stating, "Dark clouds are on top of us now. Animals are anxious. Something is coming," followed a few minutes later by "Heavy sideways rain. Bloom will be off the canola. You might as well head home."
And that we did, choosing to drive south on Highway 9 to Alameda to skirt the coming storm instead of heading headlong into it along Highway 13. This was where the weather radar on a smart phone became very useful. I took a meteorology course in university, so I know a bit about bad weather. As my wife drove I saw at least two, and possibly three, wall clouds, the bottom of a cumulonimbus thunderhead from which twisters can form.
We made it all the way to the edge of Estevan without so much as a drop of rain. We saw what looked like a funnel cloud forming over our heads near Beinfait just 10 minutes before. But then the rain hit.
In the space for two kilometres we went from a few drops to a total whiteout, if that's what you call it. We could not see the end of the hood of our truck, just as we entered the city on the busiest road in the industrial area. There's a semi every few seconds on this stretch, so much so that the province just announced they will be twinning it shortly. Here we were, blinkers on, on the edge of the road, hoping a wide load semi doesn't plow into us.
We couldn't even get all the way off the road, either. Half of the truck was in traffic. People behind us were slowing down and stopping for the same reason, thank God. After a few minutes we were able to creep off the highway to a side road. The visibility had not improved very much, but at least we weren't likely to get smeared.
After a switch in drivers and some very loud hail, I got us under the canopy of the Co-op card lock. We felt safe for a minute, until we realized there was lightning all around us, and we were parked under a metal canopy with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel below us.
Driving out of the Co-op, we soon found our truck in nine inches of water. All along Kensington Avenue, the ditches and parking lots were flash-flooding. It looked like High River had hit Estevan in a heartbeat.
When you see people on TV driving through deep water during flash floods like this, the immediate thought is they are idiots. However, when you are trying to get those last few blocks home, a bit of desperation sets in. If the car in front of you made it through eight inches of water, you think you can too. Suddenly, you are the idiot. Thankfully we didn't drown the truck in the process.
As we've seen in Calgary, High River and elsewhere, intense rain can hit anywhere, without any notice. Unless, of course, you look at the radar on your cellphone.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
