‘A pretty rare event’: Storm brings wind gusts as high as 115 km/h to parts of Sask.

A storm that whipped its way into the province on Thursday has left some damage in its wake.

According to Environment Canada, the low-pressure system brought wind gusts over 100 km/h to a number of communities in southern Saskatchewan. The strongest winds were felt in Radville, southwest of Weyburn, where gusts of 115 km/h were reported.

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Kayla Bilous, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said she’s heard about some trees that were knocked down by the storm in the Regina area, while a number of power outages were also reported. The storm snapped a number of large tree branches, and tipped over signs and garbage cans in some parts of the city.

The high wind speeds were “a pretty rare event” in Saskatchewan weather, Bilous said.

Kayla Bilous, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, says the high wind speeds seen in parts of Saskatchewan on Thursday are typically associated with thunderstorms, making the storm “a pretty rare event” for the province. (Lisa Schick/980 CJME)

“It’s pretty rare with this type of system,” she explained. “Usually at this time of year, we only get winds like that out of thunderstorms, but this was a really strong low-pressure system that produced these winds.”

According to SaskPower, winds were gusting to 97 km/h around Eastend at around 6 p.m. on Thursday, bringing down 10 transmission structures in the area.

“We were able to restore some customers through switching, through feeding and from different lines, but Eastend is fed by that one transmission line, so we need to get those structures repairs before we can get the power back on,” explained Joel Cherry, spokesperson for SaskPower.

Cherry said the wind – combined with wet conditions in the area – was making it hard for SaskPower crews to respond to the outage.

Meanwhile, an outage in Regina left about 20,000 residents in the dark.

Andres Roldan, who lives in Regina’s Heritage neighbourhood, said he had an uneasy feeling as the wind picked up on Thursday afternoon, and he heard a loud boom at around 3 p.m.

“I was looking out the window, and all I saw was this branch falling very slowly towards the house,” Roldan said.

Andres Roldan stands next to a large broken tree branch at his home on Ottawa Street in Regina. (Gillian Massie/ 980 CJME)

A tree branch about the length of a city bus fell onto both Roldan’s home and his neighbours’ home.

“I was very shocked,” he said. “I was like ‘Holy crap. I had a feeling that this was going to happen at some point.’”

Roldan said as far as he can tell, the fallen branch only caused minor damage to his eaves.

City crews began chopping the tree into chunks and hauling it away on Friday morning.

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The storm also led to some chaos on highways on Thursday, with the Saskatchewan RCMP reporting semi trailers pushed over by the high winds on a number of different routes. Police warned about debris on the road, and advised drivers to keep two hands on the wheel in order to be prepared for sudden gusts.

While the worst of the storm is over, Bilous said Friday will still be quite windy in parts of the province, with Regina expected to see gusts up to about 70 km/h and some more rain coming to some regions.

“We’re expecting it still to be pretty gusty today. We still do have a wind warning area out for parts of southeast Saskatchewan, like the Moosomin and Carylyle region,” Bilous said.

“We have some rain up near Saskatoon, the Battlefords, Meadow Lake, that kind of area. That’s going to kind of continue today. It’ll push into the Regina area by this evening, and then we could even see a risk of a thunderstorm for Regina this afternoon and this evening.”

Bilous said the winds should die down overnight on Friday.

Looking ahead to the long weekend, the meteorologist said no more significant storms are expected to hit the province. She said winds could pick up again on Sunday to around 50-60 km/h, “but nothing like what we saw yesterday.”

While Radville saw the strongest wind gusts in Thursday’s storm, Climax was close behind, where gusts of 109 km/h were reported. Milestone, Coronach and Swift Current all felt gusts of 107 km/h, while wind gusts in Estevan, Yellow Grass and Val Marie reached 106 km/h.

Gusts of 98 km/h were reported in Regina on Thursday, while in Saskatoon the winds reached 74 km/h.

–with files from 980 CJME’s Gillian Massie and Lisa Schick