Thousands were without power Tuesday morning after thunderstorms swept through southern Manitoba, knocking down overhead lines and bringing a surge of floodwater that swamped some communities.
“We are all stuck in our houses right now,” Nicole Krieger said, speaking by phone from Kleefeld, where the water was deep enough to stop cars in their tracks.
“Every time we thought that the rain would stop — it slowed down a little bit — it came back out and it was like buckets were just being poured everywhere.”
Kleefeld, a town of roughly 1,900 people in the RM of Hanover, was one of dozens of southeastern Manitoba communities hammered by high wind and rain.
Inclement weather began Monday and is expected to continue through parts of the week, Environment Canada said.
“We have an awful lot of rain. Some of our communities were up to eight inches plus (of water) and we are starting to feel the effects of it,” Hanover Reeve Jim Funk said. “We have tractors and pumps and so forth going. We are doing what we can… but culverts cannot take what is all flowing.”
Blumenort, Kleefeld and Mitchell were among the communities hardest hit by the storms, Funk said. Water swamped streets, washed out roads and poured into basements.
“We have an awful lot of rain. Some of our communities were up to eight inches plus (of water) and we are starting to feel the effects of it.”– Hanover Reeve Jim Funk
The RM provided empty sandbags to community members and asked them to order sand from a local supplier.
Krieger said her home had remained dry, but some of her neighbours were not so lucky. The downpour coincided with garbage collection day and she watched as waste and recycling bins floated away in the flood, she said.
Some people helped each other bail out basements, while others made light of the situation by paddling through the water in kayaks, Krieger said.
By 11 a.m., data from Environment Canada showed nearby St. Pierre-Jolys had received more than 160 millilitres of rain. Steinbach was similarly hit with 155 ml and Winkler, which is roughly 100 kilometres southwest, had 133 ml, said meteorologist Natalie Hasell.
The City of Steinbach published a notice asking residents to halt all water use until the rain and flooding had subsided.
“The City of Steinbach is doing everything we can to monitor and manage the situation,” it said.
Wind gusts as high as 89 km/h buffeted St. Pierre-Jolys and the surrounding area, Hasell said.
Manitoba 511 issued overland flooding advisories on at least six sections of highway that spanned an area from Winkler to Peguis First Nation, as per its online map.
Hassell urged motorists to stay up to date on road conditions and avoid affected areas.
Storm-related outages left about 3,000 Manitoba Hydro customers without power in the southeastern region, but most were resolved by mid-morning, media relations officer Peter Chura said in an email statement.
Lighting, wind and rain also downed power lines in Winnipeg’s Brooklands area, knocking out electricity for around 1,300 customers, he said.
The RRC Polytech campus on Notre Dame Avenue was among those affected and prompted the college to cancel classes. Power was restored around 2:30 p.m., and RRC announced evening classes would go ahead.
A separate outage that began at 8:30 a.m. impacted 1,136 customers in East Saint Paul, according to Hydro’s outage map. That issue was resolved after 11 a.m.
Rainfall contributed to 100,000 litres of untreated wastewater spilling into the Assiniboine River, the City of Winnipeg said.
The waste — enough to fill more than 16 CL-415 water bombers — spilled into the river over 14 hours from a lift station at 1254 Wolseley Ave., it said in a news release.
A maintenance crew determined the station pumps were operating normally, however, the weir structure — a small barrier used to regulate the flow of water — was missing, the city said.
The city did not close the floodgates because ongoing rainfall posed the risk of basement flooding. Instead, a crew worked overnight to construct a new weir and completed it just before 3 a.m. Tuesday, it said.
Environment Canada issued a tornado warning for parts of southeastern Manitoba, including Steinbach, Niverville and Grunthal around 4 p.m. on Monday.
The weather service was not aware of any weather-related injuries as per the following morning, but had received unconfirmed reports of the formation of a funnel cloud near Mitchell, Hasell said.
“We are not out of this yet.”– Environment Canada meteorologist Natalie Hasell
She noted some residents outside the affected area said they had received emergency alerts on their phones, urging them to seek shelter.
“It certainly didn’t look like there was anything unusual to the weather outside, so I dismissed it as not relevant to us,” said Fort Richmond resident Andrew Westra, who received two alerts 30 minutes apart.
The emergency alert system was working as planned, despite people far from the storm receiving notices said Kurt Eby, director of regulatory and government relations at Pelmorex, the organization behind the national alert network.
Those who received inadvertent alerts were likely connected to cellphone towers located in the affected area, which is determined by Environment Canada. It is not uncommon for people more than 40 kilometres away to receive alerts, he said.
Environment Canada is forecasting more rain to fall near Steinbach on Wednesday and Thursday. The rain is expected to stop Friday and then continue over the weekend.
“We are not out of this yet,” Hasell said.
tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca
Tyler Searle
Reporter
Tyler Searle is a multimedia producer who writes for the Free Press‘s city desk. A graduate of Red River College Polytechnic’s creative communications program, he wrote for the Stonewall Teulon Tribune, Selkirk Record and Express Weekly News before joining the paper in 2022. Read more about Tyler.
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