Storm smashes windows, uproots trees in Winnipeg, while 133 km/h winds hit Dugald

Chris Crond's bike ride to work through Winnipeg's Garden City neighbourhood Thursday evening hit a terrifying detour when hailstones started driving down on him like bullets.

"Every second that passed … it picked up faster and faster," he said. "It was intense. It was insane."

As the storm got worse, he took shelter under the closest place he could find — a shopping cart corral in the nearby Canadian Tire parking lot. Ice rattled the awning above him as water flooded up to his ankles.

"It was terrifying," he told CBC on Friday. "It was one of the scariest situations I've been in."

But almost as quickly as it started, the storm soon died down.

Large hailstones driven by powerful winds shattered windows and left dents in houses and vehicles through the northern part of Winnipeg and communities east of the city on Thursday evening.

"It ended up being quite a wild evening, weather-wise, and a lot of damage, obviously, reported with that," Environment Canada senior meteorologist Brad Vrolijk said Friday morning.

"Throughout that whole region was widespread hail up to the size of golf balls [and] generally 20-30 millimetres of rain and winds up to about 90 or 95 km/h. So for anyone in that area, it was probably one of the worst thunderstorms they've seen in Winnipeg in quite a while."

A line of thunderstorms started around 6 p.m. on the east side of Lake Manitoba and the southernmost storm in that line cut through Winnipeg, Vrolijk said.

It began to "perk up" on its approach, "and just as it went into the north end, it really, really ramped up," he said.

Marilyn Magtoto's legs were covered in bruises after getting caught in a hailstorm while on her bike at Dugald Road and the Perimeter Highway.

"It just came down on us really hard," she told CBC on Friday. "There was really nowhere to go."

The storm "came out of nowhere," she said, adding the weather was sunny and hot when she and a group of women headed out Thursday evening.

The group huddled together on the side of the road to try to protect themselves.

"All we could do was just hang onto our bikes and brace ourselves," Magtoto said.

WATCH | Winnipeggers assess the damage from the storm:

Storm smashes windows and uproots trees in Winnipeg

1 year ago

Duration 2:25

Winnipeggers are assessing the damage after large hailstones driven by powerful winds shattered windows and left dents in houses and vehicles on Thursday evening.

City spokesman David Driedger said as of 3 p.m. Friday, 330 reports of downed or broken trees had been made to the city's 311 line.

The hardest-hit areas were West and North Kildonan and eastward through Transcona and beyond. A weather station just east of the city, in Dugald, recorded a wind gust of 133 km/h.

"That's a very extreme wind for a thunderstorm — 90 [km/h] is actually where we start warning for wind damage," Vrolijk said.

There was a report of a funnel cloud near Dugald and possibly a tornado, he said, and someone said it touched down and caused damage on their property.

"We're going to look into that today. It's hard to know whether or not there was a tornado or not there," Vrolijk said. 

Most of the clouds associated with the storm had low bases so "it almost looked like they were kind of rolling along the ground," he said. "And with all that cloud flowing into the thunderstorm, lots of things can look like funnel clouds that aren't."

It's more likely the damage was caused by "very strong, straight-line winds" as opposed to a rotating wind associated with a tornado, Vrolijk said. 

Although the total amount of rain associated with the storm wasn't great, in some places it came down very quickly and heavily, causing localized flooding that cleared up after about an hour, he said.

Selkirk, just north of Winnipeg, was the area that received the highest rainfall totals, with one volunteer observer reporting 110 mm, Vrolijk said.

"It was kind of like they were stuck in a little cluster of storms that were slower to move out of the area," he said.

Barb Robson was babysitting for her son in the Transcona area when the storm hit. It rained and was windy where she was, but she didn't think much of it until she got home — just a few blocks away.

Her street, Victoria Avenue E., looked like it had been whipped by a tornado, she said.

"It was just horrendous when I came home and saw all the damage. It was just piles of what looked like snow when I got here. All my plants are done. My garden is done."

The eavestroughs, soffits, siding and shingles on her home, shed and garage are all damaged — broken or pitted by the hail. There are trees down all through her front yard and the yards of her neighbours.

"I've never seen anything like this, and we've been here for over 40 years. It's quite sad," Robson said. "There's going to be a big insurance claim here. A lot of people are going to have a lot of work to do."

More clouds rolled into Winnipeg and surrounding areas again on Friday, bringing a chance for some light showers "but nothing substantial," Vrolijk said.

Power remained out for chunks of the city on Friday morning, impacting about 2,700 customers in the Luxton area, close to 1,000 in Transcona and dozens more in The Maples and North Kildonan.

"Yesterday's storms caused a fair bit of damage across our system in southern Manitoba and in Winnipeg. We had outages scattered across that whole region," Manitoba Hydro spokesperson Anthonie Koop said, adding there were numerous reports of trees down.

"Our crews worked through the night, responding primarily to emergency calls and outages that were affecting large groups of customers, but we still have over 5,000 customers out. So that will be our focus as we work through today."