I bet the title caught your eye, didn't it? And yes, this story is about a tornado.

I was going to post this earlier except the site was having problems. Well, this is how it went; my friends invited me over to their cottage for a few days. We got got there on Friday, August 4 (we went in a Mustang) and we got there late so there wasn't much to do except sit around and watch Hot Shots on TV.

The next day, I was all excited that I would get to go tubing or wake boarding but there was a thunderstorm most of the day. It wasn't bad though, I still had lots of fun. In the afternoon (4:15), everyone had to go to church but there wasn't enough room for me (the grandparents were there). I just stayed back and watched Simpsons while they were gone. You are probably wondering why they went to church on Saturday; don't ask me because I don't know why either.

Anyways, I was watching Simpsons and then another Simpsons, and another, and after the fourth Simpsons ended, all the power went out. I was lucky that it was only 6:00 so it wasn't dark. I wasn't surprised that the power went out, there was a thunder storm all day. I thought the power would return soon enough. While I was waiting for my friends to return, I sat by the window and ate peanuts for 15 minutes.

They returned at 6:15 and I told them that the power went out at 6:00. They told me that they saw a funnel cloud, fairly close on the way back to the cottage. An hour had passed before we decided to phone the Hydro company and ask them about the power outage. They said that there may have been a tornado.

My friends had relatives that were staying in a trailer, not too far away. We decided to go see if there actually was a tornado. We all got in to the van and sure enough, there was a tornado that ripped through trees near the highway. The tornado must have been fairly wide too. You could see the path of uprooted and broken trees. We saw the cause of the power outage; many tees had fallen on to the power lines.

Here is the interesting part; we believe that when they came back from church, that they were basically running away from and barely missing the tornado. At 6:00, the tornado hit a couple of trees on to the power lines. My friends were still coming home when the tornado hit. If they stayed an extra 10 minutes or so at church then they could have been caught in the tornado. Well, 5 minutes going down the highway, we see the damage of the tornado. That is how close it came to the cottage.

We kept driving until we got to the trailer park where my friends' relatives were supposed to be. Luckily they didn't come for an unknown reason. The tornado went right through the trailer park. Everything got trashed at the trailer park. The police were there and they didn't allow us to go check out all of the damage. Apparently there were people missing on the water at the time and one person died.

We then found out that the power would be out for at least two days. On Sunday, we decided to go home.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2006/08/05/tornado-manitoba.html?ref=rss