First came the heat warnings on Friday. Then came the tornado warnings. We’ve had more than one tornado warning this year, and we kept our eye on the sky. In the late afternoon, my phone started alerting me to lightning strikes in the district followed by tornado beeping. We tracked the weather radar apps on our phones and realized that at some point we were going to be hit by a tremendous storm.
Little did we realize how intense the wind would become. We watched a two tall spruce trees bent almost in half before righting. Time and time again we watched the madness of the ballet. And then we heard a thunderous crash. We couldn’t see anything of damage and when the rain let up, we went out and surveyed the cabin property. A white pine beside the sleeping cabin had snapped off twenty feet in the air and managed to only bend the edge of the metal roof. We had been spared. Other trees on our lake property were down.
One never recognizes how ferocious wind can be. One seldom sees rain driving so hard that visibility is reduced to less than one hundred feet. One seldom sees huge downpours.
Unfortunately, this is 2025 and weather and climates are changing. We wakened to hear of the flood in Texas, and as I write this, over 100 deaths have occurred, many young campers. The river rose eight meters in 45 minutes in the middle of the night. Search and rescue teams continue to search for missing people.
It is but one of many weather-related catastrophes that we are witness to. In our region Red Lake fire 12 continues to burn, having reached in size of 167,000 hectares. Several thousand first nations people have been evacuated to Thunder Bay, Sudbury and Toronto. They are finally being able to return to their homes. The fires across Canada have been intensified by drought across wide areas.
The residents of Lynn Lake, Manitoba, are being evacuated for the second time this year.
For almost one month, television screens were filled with the news of fires burning out of control destroying hundreds of homes in Las Angelas. The devastation was brought into our homes. Last year we witnessed Jasper being burned.
A lot of these huge fires are coming from drought and poor snowfalls. This spring farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta are seeing disappearing crops and many are being forced to sell off herds. And the selling off those herds will add costs to our grocery bills. The costs of fighting these huge fires will be felt in our taxes and increased insurance costs.
We might wish to believe that the changes in weather patterns are just an abnormality, but the continuing changes in rainfall and snowfall, summer and winter temperature extremes are impacting our everyday life.
