Greg Mason was outside his trailer home in Hines Creek, Alta., filming a summer storm when he noticed the clouds started to roll in faster. A wall of rain came down and he couldn’t see over the edge of his 16-foot deck. Debris flew across the yard hitting the house. Mason, his wife and their cat and dog hunkered down next to their living room couch, feeling the house fall and growl like a wild animal. Then the room was filled with the screeching of claws being pulled. The roof was torn off. “We’re 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 on the mend after a powerful storm hit Friday night. Uprooted and broken trees, roofs and general debris littered the community on Saturday. Alberta Emergency Warning has issued a tornado warning for the Fairview, Alta. – just southeast of Hines Creek – just before 9:45 p.m. on Friday because a strong storm nearby was “probably producing a tornado.” Residents of Hines Creek told CBC News that the storm had already been brewing for a while before things got bad. They didn’t get the notification until after the worst was over. Environment Canada and Climate Change (ECCC) is still investigating what happened, meteorologist Danielle Desjardins told CBC News on Saturday morning. “It could have been a plow or straight winds, or it could have been a tornado,” Desjardins said. When Desjardins spoke with CBC News Saturday morning, the ECCC had not yet received a tornado image. The community had lost power at some point during the storm, which hampered the public’s ability to send real-time information, photos and footage of the weather event, he added. From 5 pm on Saturday, the ATCO power outage map shows two outages in the Hines Creek area, affecting nearly 500 customers. Photos posted on social media show trees completely uprooted, snapped in half or bent. Some structures, such as sheds, were damaged or destroyed. and the roofs of some houses and buildings were torn off. Friday night’s storm ripped the roof off Greg Mason’s trailer home, shown here. A GoFundMe campaign was started Saturday to help pay for a new roof. (GoFundMe) The weather service had received many reports of walls of rain and hail the size of ping-pong balls. Hail began to fall after the roof ripped off Mason’s trailer. The chunks of ice looked like golf balls, he said. Kathy Loxterkamp and her husband have lived in Hines Creek for more than 50 years and have never seen a storm like this. “We’ve had bad weather, and there have been times where trees have fallen. But nothing like this, ever,” Loxterkamp said. “It was so instantaneous.” Friday was warm and the storm looked like it would be fairly typical, he said. But around 8:30 p.m., things started to turn eerie, and Loxterkamp and her husband went inside their house in case it rained. Posts on social media show several downed trees in parts of Hines Creek, Alta., after Friday night’s storm. (Stephanie Kowal/Facebook) Then the countryside turned white, Loxterkamp said. She and her husband hid in their basement because the weather showed all the signs of a tornado coming. Footage from their security cameras showed trees coming down. “What’s going to happen up there?” she and her husband wondered from the basement. “Will the roof be there?” Loxterkamp and her husband were also grateful to have a basement, she added. About 10 minutes later, it was quiet outside again, he 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 has shone brightly in the hours since the storm. After time passed, members of the Mennonite community stopped by Mason’s property with sandwiches and supplies to put a tarp over his trailer home where the roof was. Others have donated trucks and a Bobcat tractor to help pick up debris from the yard, he said. A GoFundMe campaign was started Saturday morning to help pay for a new roof. He had raised $305 as of 4:30 p.m “This community is none of the top shelf,” said Mason, who will stay in a borrowed fifth-wheel trailer with his wife for a while. “People came together and everyone helped everyone.” Loxterkamp checked on her neighbors as soon as the weather passed Friday night, she said. The whole event was distressing and he didn’t go to bed until 2am At 6:30 a.m., she and her husband were cutting downed trees and moving debris around their yard. They need to replace a shed, and there were a lot of trees down, 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 Kowal/Facebook) She and a neighbor also stopped at the senior living facility to check on the residents there, Loxterkamp 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.”
