Tornado touchdown tears into farmyard south of Regina

Cole Zinkhan arrived home from some time at the lake and was shocked at the state of his shop.

“I thought maybe some stuff (would be damaged) but I didn’t think it was going to be this extent,” Zinkhan said Monday as he surveyed the damage on his farm five minutes southeast of Regina near Rowatt.

His shop had been given an unexpected sunroof after a tornado rolled through Saturday evening. The roof of his shop lays in mangled chunks of twisted metal across his field.

Zinkhan got a call from a neighbour on Sunday who let him know the shop had been hit in the storm. The debris made it all the way to the neighbour’s house.

Some of the roof of Zinkhan’s shop had been hurled into the ditch of the Regina Bypass south of the city.

“I didn’t really know what to think,” he said when asked what he expected to see at his farm after getting the news. “I just kind of wanted to get home. I know there was nothing we could do, but (I wanted to) just get home and see what the extent was.”

About 75 per cent of the shop’s roof was torn off in the storm and one window on a tractor was blown out, but much of the farm equipment in the shop remained undamaged. Bent ceiling rods surround motorcycles that are still standing upright on their kickstands.

Only minimal attention was paid to the shop in attempts to clean it up Monday. The morning was dedicated to picking debris out of the neighbour’s field so he could continue seeding.

Zinkhan does not have much hope for fixing the building.

“To me, I think it needs to be torn down and rebuilt,” said Zinkhan. “Whether insurance thinks that, that’s another thing.”

Zinkhan’s wife, Jennifer Kreklewich, expressed her amazement that none of the farm equipment was seriously damaged.

“As I tell other people, the tornado ate (the shop) and spit it out all over the field,” she said with a laugh. “We have everything scattered all over inside. Luckily, a lot of our bigger things inside weren’t wrecked, like our equipment and boat and things like that, so that was good.”

The farmhouse, located 200 feet from the shop, wasn’t touched. Neither were the power lines 300 feet in the opposite direction of the shop.

Kreklewich said this isn’t her first time experiencing a close call with high winds, but it is the first time that she has seen such incredible damage.

“It’s sad, it’s awful, it’s devastating, but we were safe,” said Kreklewich. “We weren’t home. There was no damage to the houses, which I can’t be more grateful for … This was close enough and too close to home, but I’m still grateful that nobody was hurt and the houses didn’t get damaged at all.”

Tornado warning was late

Environment Canada confirmed Monday that a weather radar station in the Regina area wasn’t operating Saturday night, making it difficult for meteorologists to track the storm.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says the tornado landed south of the city at around 8:55 p.m., but the tornado warning didn’t go out until seven minutes later.

Meteorologist Terri Lang said a radar station at Bethune was down that day, making it hard to get readings on spinning activity in clouds. The station has been down since May 24 due to a broken piece of equipment. The radar is expected to be fixed by June 1.

“It didn’t help the situation,” Lang said. “It made it more challenging to try and track the storm.”

Lang says meteorologists were using radar near Saskatoon, in western Manitoba and in northern Montana to track the storm. They also used satellite photos, surface observations and lightning detectors.

Environment Canada and the Northern Tornadoes Project have confirmed the twister, which was Canada’s first of 2023.

The weather service gave the tornado a preliminary rating of EF0 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. That’s the lowest of the six categories on the scale, which uses 28 damage indicators and eight levels of the degree of damage.

— With files from The Canadian Press