Residents begin clean up after Tuesday's wind and rain storm
By Bruce Fuhr
Eric Ramsden thought the thud he heard outside his house was just the sound of the Vancouver Canucks continuing to hit rock bottom.
But once the Lower Bonnington resident headed to the bedroom window to survey his back yard, he realized the thud he heard was just another reminder how unpredictable Mother Nature.
“I was getting ready for hockey game,” the resident of 4000 block of Corra Linn Road said Wednesday morning after surveying the clean up in the front and back yards.
“The wind started howling and I heard a crash. I looked out window and saw the trees bend like I’ve never seen in the 20 years we’ve been living here.”
“And then I heard a crash and saw a tree fall from the neighbour’s yard.”
The initial crash was a tree in the neighbour’s yard snap off 50 feet from the ground and land on the satellite dish.
No hockey for this fan.
Ramsden then looked and saw the tree in the front yard going down so he quickly grabbed the phone ran down into the basement in case any other trees were going to use the house as a landing pad.
Castlegar weather specialist Ron Lakeman said the region experienced its first major storm of the spring.
A cold front filled with a number of thunderstorms replaced the high pressure hovering over the region Tuesday.
Those thunderstorms were led by high winds coming out of the southeast of 80-plus kilometers in Castlegar and 56 kilometer per hour gusts in the Nelson area.
“You could almost call it a gust front as in there was a line of thunderstorms which were somewhat dissipating when the front moved and the reinforcing action of the those two produced significant wind,” Lakeman explained.
For Ramsden the storm lasted from about two hours, or most of the hockey game.
“It was really windy with a lot of branches going horizontally down the road and the trees were really arced over and I hadn’t seen that so dramatically before,” he said.
Winds dropped trees across roads and onto houses.
Some Sproule Creek residents were forced to delay their travels home until the road was cleared while a portable garage-tent completely flipped over due to the winds.
The pending storm canceled Nelson City Soccer League games Tuesday evening.
Tuesday power was out all night in the Slocan City area.
Wednesday a tree fell across the road closing Highway 31 near Queens Bay.
Lakeman said the trailing storm has dropped 50-plus millimeters of rain in Nelson over the past 24 hours.
Which raises the question can West Kootenyites get ready for another spring of 2012?
“It’s too early to tell,” Lakeman confessed. “It certainly looks like it’s going to be we for a while, but not as wet as we say (Tuesday) night.”
“But beyond two weeks it’s difficult to say how June or the latter half of June will play out.”
What Lakeman did say was the recent warm trend in May 2013 was six days longer — 20 days in total — than the experienced in May 2012.
That will be gratifying for Ramsden to know when he’s cleaning up the yard from the Storm of 2013.
See previous story:
https://thenelsondaily.com/news/mother-nature-raises-havoc-west-kootenay-24826#.UZ06w-vwNE4
