About five minutes of rain, wind, and lots of pebble-sized hail left a mess around the Battlefords on Saturday night.
The storm hit around 10 p.m., starting with thunder and lightning, then conditions that resembled a powerful blizzard. The wind was so strong it blew the hail sideways like snow, and deep water was running in the streets.
Afterwards, there were small steaming piles of melting hailstones, surrounded in the streets by leaves and branches.
Two parked vehicles were smashed by a falling tree.
“I was just sitting here having a cigarette, watching the lightning and the clouds, and they were coming fast,” recalled vehicle owner Jean Thunderchild, “and I said, oh, better go inside. Then I finished locking the door and I looked out and the tree was already down.”
With files from BattlefordsNOW.