Winnipeggers react to Tuesday’s storm

Mother Nature has been wreaking havoc across the province for the past week, and on Tuesday, Winnipeg felt her presence.

The streets flooded, there was baseball-sized hail, cars got stranded in underpasses, and if there’s one silver lining to the carnage of the storm, it’s that kids are still having fun.

“I’m always looking for good video ideas because I just started managing the Windburn Instagram and Facebook accounts about two months ago. I looked out my window, and it was just after the storm had finished. The rain had just stopped, and I looked out the window, and there were a whole bunch of kids just playing in the one to two foot deep water, just outside my street, just in the middle of the road. So I decided it would be a good idea to go do a swim workout and record it,” said Nolan Law, a triathlete at Windburn Multi-Sport Academy.

Law is a 16-year-old from Oakbank and just finished in second place at his first draft legal race, and the training clearly hasn’t stopped. The video has already received a quarter million views, and for Law, it was well worth it.

“I was expecting it to be pretty gross, but believe it or not, it was actually not that bad. It’s pretty much the same as Birdshill Park, maybe even a little better. Like I got in and was expecting it to be all brown and gross, but I could see the bottom, and it was not too bad,” said Law.

But it was a different story for residents living in East Kildonan.

“Everyone was trying to use Concordia, so rapidly trying to get to the hospital, to get to wherever they needed to go. But nobody paid attention to the flooding on either side,” said Scott Getty, an East Kildonan resident.

Getty got a front row seat to the mayhem at Concordia Avenue and Louelda Street, and when he saw a family stuck in their van from his apartment, he and his neighbours took action.

“We just got out there and tried to help people, and it was a community coming together.”

Just around the corner, Jordan Coulter works at Winnipeg iPhone Repair, a business that specializes in repairing devices with water damage. He said he’s never seen a storm like this.

“Other than the massive golf ball-sized hail, a flooded street of course. I thought I could go out with my rubber boots and maybe make some splashes. But it was so bad our windows were pouring out water,” Coulter explained.

Coulter says that thankfully nothing was damaged during the storm, but the same can’t be said for Jana Stratford-Whaterous; she lost a window from the hail, and her backyard? It sits on the edge of a pond and is submerged in water.

“It doesn’t happen often; I mean there’s times when we get lots of rain, and it comes up a little bit, but only once before have I seen it this high, and that was about 15 years ago,” said Stratford-Whaterous.