Miracle on the Prairies

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2017 (2501 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ELIE — Ten years ago this week, Lynn Kauppila and her husband Les were in the basement, huddling under a mattress, while the strongest tornado ever to touch down in Canada ripped their house off its foundation and threw it into the farmer’s field across the road.

In the days that followed, they didn’t find ruby slippers — only well-worn cowboy boots belonging to Les — but Lynn did find the closest thing while rummaging with her dog Teak through the wreckage where her home used to be.

“I picked up a board and underneath it was a video of…” she said pausing for a couple of seconds.

“The Wizard of Oz. This is after my nephews said they’d call us Dorothy and Toto from now on. I couldn’t believe it.”

“And it isn’t ours,” Les interjects, shaking his head and chuckling.

“It came from somewhere else. It dropped here because the whole house was gone with only the basement left. There was nothing to stop it from falling in.”

Whenever the skies turn dark and the winds whip up in this community about 30 kilometres west of Winnipeg, several residents here who survived June 22, 2007 head to their basements.

On that day, at 3:50 p.m., Environment Canada upgraded a thunderstorm watch to a severe thunderstorm warning for the area. A tornado was spotted touching down north of the Trans-Canada Highway and northwest of Elie at 6:25 p.m.

The tornado, heading southeast towards Elie, blew a semi-trailer off the highway, damaged grain storage binds at a flour mill — tossing an empty one on its side and blowing thousands of dollars worth of tools from a large shed into a nearby fire-suppression water pond — before heading to a residential street on the south side of town.

Four homes were completely destroyed and three others were damaged before the tornado backed up and hit the flour mill again. It then headed south before collapsing and disappearing.

Storm investigators later classified the tornado’s strength as an F5, the strongest possible, on the Fujita scale.

David Sills, a severe-weather scientist with Environment Canada, said that scale isn’t used here anymore — it was replaced with the Enhanced Fujita scale a few years ago — but that doesn’t change how powerful the tornado in Elie was.

“It would still be the strongest tornado in Canada even under the EF scale,” Sills says.

“Thankfully, it wasn’t the worst tornado. That’s the Regina, Sask., tornado on June 30, 1912. It was an F4 and there were 28 fatalities.”

Miraculously, given the tornado’s power, no one was killed or seriously injured in Elie.

• • •

At the southwest end of town, Elie Street West starts out as a mix of older buildings and then suddenly turns into line of homes, all of which are roughly a decade old. There are no mature trees now, but 10 years ago there were so many around these houses the Kauppilas couldn’t see the tornado.

Lynn says the first they knew of it was when their daughter — who had left with her boyfriend to drive to Winnipeg a few minutes earlier — phoned frantically to say they were caught in a hailstorm and could see a tornado bearing down on Elie.

Lynn and Les went to a corner of the basement, huddled on top of a sectional couch and pulled a hide-a-bed mattress over top of them. “I saw that in a report on disasters,” he says.

After the tornado passed, he says, “I told her the house is gone.

“She said, ‘You’re full of it.’ And then she heard gas leaking. I don’t know how she got out of there so fast…, but one minute she was there and the next she wasn’t.”

Says Lynn: “The main beam was snapped, so I must have climbed up the beam.”

What she can still clearly remember, though, is the noise.

“I remember the sound. We have a train that goes by at night and sometimes I’ll jump up because I hear that same roaring sound.”

The Kauppilas say that thanks to the help of people they know — and insurance — they were in their new house by Christmas that year. And besides Les’s cowboy boots, searchers also found a few other items, including her wedding dress.

A decade later, their respect — fear, really — for severe weather is as fresh and raw as ever.

“I want to see so I go out to see what’s coming first when there is a storm,” Les says.

“And I say to go to the basement even when it rains,” Lynn says.

Two doors down from the Kauppilas, Jocelyne Godin was able to recover a few of her possessions, but the one she really wanted back had her husband Marcel’s ashes in it. He had died three years earlier.

“When they were doing the sweep of the field, I told people, ‘If you see something that looks like a large nail, a bolt that is made of brass, that’s my husband’s ashes,’” she says. “He was a welder, so we wanted something to represent him.

“When they found it, it was stuck in a piece of gyprock.”

Godin recalls saying goodbye to her cat, Minou, shutting the door for what turned out to be the last time, and going to visit her sister a short distance away on a street to the north of the tracks in her backyard. She said her son, Lee, was dropping off two portable toilets with a friend at her house for an event planned for that weekend.

When they realized a tornado was bearing down on the community, Godin, with her sister and six or seven others, headed for the only place they could think of in a house without a basement — a windowless bathroom.

“We heard the hum and then the hydro went off,” she says. “We said we were dead. We were all saying the Lord’s Prayer, three of us in the shower stall and the rest in the room.”

Godin says they all survived and no one was injured because the house wasn’t hit. And her son and his friend quickly drove east to safety. Another resident later found her dead cat under a broken window.

She remembers how, about an hour after the tornado went through, her relatives were very quiet when she approached them.

“I finally said, ‘Is my house gone?’” she says.

“When they said ‘yes,’ I said, ‘Nobody got hurt, nobody died, my house is the least of our concern.’”

Godin laughs at the recollection of her bathing suit hanging — prominently — from a tree. But her mood changes; she misses the photos she had on the wall of her husband’s great-grandparents that were never found.

Godin has since rebuilt, and there are two features she didn’t have in the destroyed house.

“I now have a basement; I used to just have a crawl space,” she says.

“And they built me a safe room with no windows in the basement. (The main floor of the house) is not attached to the ceiling of the safe room downstairs. So now, when it is lightning like crazy, I go downstairs. I have a couch and a blanket there.

“I still want to stay here.”

And Godin solved one mystery the Free Press wrote about at the time.

A resident of an apartment near Bishop Grandin Boulevard and Pembina Highway in Winnipeg noticed some financial documents fluttering down to the ground a little while after the tornado hit Elie.

Ken Commodore said at the time, the banking information was in French and he was going to mail it back to the address on the piece of paper.

“It was my bank statement,” Godin says. “I got it back. It landed all the way in Winnipeg.”

Despite being hit by the tornado, Prairie Flour Mills is still located at the west end of town just south of the Trans-Canada Highway.

Clayton Manness, the owner of the company and a former Tory MLA from 1981 to 1995 who, for a time, was finance minister in the Filmon government, points to the main building’s construction as the reason it remains standing.

“There’s a mill here today only because we spent an extra half-million dollars into pre-cast concrete walls,” Manness says, adding there was no one inside when the tornado hit.

“We had been working weekends for four months and we never shut down. That weekend was the very first Friday night we were shut down.”

Interestingly, while the mill is in the midst of expanding and constructing an additional building, Manness says it will be constructed of metal, not concrete.

“It is not concrete because we can’t afford it,” he says.

• • •

Roland Rasmussen was the reeve of the RM of Cartier at the time. Rasmussen says the most positive thing he saw in the wake of the tornado was the response.

“It was great to see the community come together,” he says. “Everyone in town was affected.”

The current reeve, Dale Fossay, who was a councillor in the RM at the time, credits all of the volunteers, including area Hutterite colonies and firefighters from halls far from Elie, who helped residents who’d lost their homes and with the cleanup.

“I guess it’s what Canadians do,” he says. “When there is natural disaster or human tragedy, Canadians step up.”

• • •

Lynn Kauppila thinks about what she and Les would have missed had they not survived that evening: the weddings they wouldn’t have attended, the grandchildren they wouldn’t know.

“You cherish more things and we cherish our kids and family even more so now,” she says. “It’s an experience most don’t have.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca