Photo courtesy Village of Hines Creek Facebook

By Erika Rolling

Severe Weather

Community comes together after possible tornado in Hines Creek

Aug 2, 2022 | 2:34 PM

This past long weekend had Albertans seeking shelter with severe storm warnings issued across the Peace and province.

At around 9:00 p.m. Friday night, the Village of Hines Creek received the brunt of an extreme storm; roofs ripped off buildings, mature trees up-rooted and fell on multiple power lines causing outages, and fence posts snapped in half.

Social media was flooded with pictures and videos of the short, but mighty storm that ravaged the small community of 335 according to the 2021 census.

Environment Canada has not confirmed whether or not the storm cell that passed through was a tornado, but an Alberta Emergency Alert of a possible tornado was issued for Fairview shortly after the same storm passed through the village.

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Deputy Mayor of the Village Alison Bjornson says it only took 10 minutes to cause extensive damage to the community.

“You can definitely trace a path through the village of where… whatever it was hit. I mean everybody got hit with the wind, without question.”

“There’s quite a few people that are going to be replacing shingles here in the next little bit,” she says.

Bjornson says there were around 11-12 trees that had fallen onto power lines following the storm, with ATCO on site in less than half an hour.

“Our first concern was removing these trees and getting everybody’s power restored. Obviously, that took out our water treatment plant and sewer, we watched one of the transformers blow up behind the Hines Creek Hotel and Bar…”

A boil water advisory is in effect for residents in the community of Hines Creek.

“Everything is still being treated, the water is running as normal but we haven’t got confirmation that the water is good at this point, until the bacteria test comes back we can’t confirm,” Bjornson notes.

There’s no way to put it into words what I’ve witnessed. It was phenomenal to watch the community come together like that and the outlying communities, and the businesses.

Bjornson says it was hard to fathom the amount of support that came from surrounding communities to come and help the people of Hines Creek.

“Volunteers came from everywhere, we had people from Crooked Creek, we had people from two hours away. In Cleardale and Worsley that came in and worked non-stop through the night and next day to help us..”

“Before I got out of my house there was already a crew of people out there working to put tarps on things, it was really, really incredible to watch and see,” she choked up while saying.

She says the Mennonite and Hutterite communities surrounding came in “full force for two days straight.”

A local business cooked food all-day Saturday for the community, another donated water, and one donated multiple porta potties according to Bjornson.

She says now the community is in recovery mode and the majority of the issues have been resolved on the village’s end.