It took a matter of minutes.
Greg Mason was outside his trailer home in Hines Creek, Alta., filming a summer thunderstorm when he noticed the clouds starting to roll in faster. A wall of rain fell and he couldn’t see over the edge of his 16-foot deck. Debris flew across the yard and hit the house.
Mason, his wife and their cat and dog huddled against the sofa in the living room, feeling the house shake and whimper like a wild animal. Then the room was filled with the screeching of nails being pulled. The roof came off.
“We were going to die,” Mason recalled thinking at the time. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
The village of Hines Creek, about 445 kilometers northwest of Edmonton, is in recovery mode after a severe storm swept through Friday night. Uprooted and broken trees, roofs and general debris littered the community Saturday.
Alberta’s Emergency Warning Service issued a tornado warning for the area of Fairview, Alta., – just southeast of Hines Creek – just before 9:45 p.m. Friday, as a strong thunderstorm nearby was “potentially producing a tornado.”
Hines Creek residents told CBC News the thunderstorm had been underway for some time before things got rough. They didn’t get the signal until the worst was over.
Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is still investigating what happened, meteorologist Daniel Desjardins told CBC News on Saturday morning.
“It could have been a plow or straight-line winds, or it could have been a tornado,” Desjardins said. When Desjardins spoke to CBC News on Saturday morning, the ECCC had not yet received an image of the tornado.
The community had lost power at one point during the storm, hampering the public’s ability to send real-time information, photos and footage of weather events, she added.
From 17:00 on Saturday, ATCO power outage card shows two outages in the Hines Creek area affecting nearly 500 customers.
Photos posted on social media showed trees that had been completely uprooted, broken in half or twisted; some structures such as sheds are damaged or destroyed; and the roofs of some homes and buildings were torn off.
Friday night’s storm ripped the roof off Greg Mason’s trailer home, shown here. A GoFundMe campaign was launched Saturday to help pay for a new roof. (GoFundMe)
The Met Office received many reports of walls of rain and hail the size of a ping-pong ball.
Hail began to fall after the roof ripped off Mason’s trailer. The ice chunks looked like golf balls, he said.
Kathy Loksterkamp and her husband have lived in Hines Creek for more than 50 years and have never witnessed a storm like this.
“We’ve had bad weather and there have been times when trees have been blown down. But nothing like this, ever,” Loksterkamp said.
“It was so instant.”
Friday was hot and it looked like the thunderstorm would be pretty typical, she said. But around 8:30 p.m., things started to turn ominous, and Loxterkamp and her husband went inside their house in case it rained.
Posts on social media showed many downed trees in parts of Hines Creek, Alta., after Friday night’s storm. (Stephanie Koval/Facebook)
Then he turned white in the open, Loksterkamp said. She and her husband hid in their basement because the weather showed every sign of a tornado coming. Footage from their security cameras shows falling trees.
“What will be up there?” she and her husband wondered from the basement. “Will the roof be there?”
Loksterkamp and her husband were also grateful to have a basement, she added.
About 10 minutes later, it was quiet outside again, she said.
The community comes together
Hines Creek, home to about 396 people, is a community where everyone knows everyone in town — and residents say that sense of community shone brightly in the hours after the storm.
As time passed, members of the Mennonite community stopped by Mason’s property with sandwiches and supplies to put a tarp over the top of his house in the trailer where the roof used to be.
Others have donated trucks and a Bobcat tractor to help pick up yard waste, he said.
A GoFundMe campaign to help pay for a new roof was launched Saturday morning. He had raised $305 as of 4:30 p.m
“This community is the best, bar none,” said Mason, who will stay for a while in a borrowed fifth wheel trailer with his wife. “People came together and everyone helped everyone.
Loksterkamp checked on her neighbors after the weather turned bad Friday night, she said. The whole event was excruciating and she didn’t go to bed until 2am
At 6:30 a.m., she and her husband were cutting fallen trees and moving debris in their yard. They will have to replace a shed, there were quite a few fallen trees, but otherwise everything was fine.
Little Denise Foods, a Filipino restaurant in Hines Creek, Alta., set up a breakfast station Saturday morning where people could pick up free coffee, pancakes and eggs. (Stephanie Koval/Facebook)
She and a neighbor also stopped by the nursing home to check on the residents there, Locksterkamp said.
This morning, Little Denise Foods, a local Filipino restaurant, set up a station to hand out free coffee, pancakes and eggs.
Loxterkamp is grateful to be part of such a community, she said.
“When something bad happens, they just come together and help.
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