It’s May 2022 and Battle City is outside of Peterborough for a trailer park’s seasonal opening event. Some rain is expected, but that’s no problem for our team – we’re ready for it.
After setting up our inflatable bunkers and sending out a couple games the sky starts to get darker and darker. I monitor the weather radar to always see what things will be like and see a red warning alert at the top of the weather app advising of a “possible tornado” and looking at the weather radar, it’s heading our way.
After a quick discussion with my mobile team we start to take precautions to be ready and come up with a plan. If the word is called we have 5-minutes to be ready to secure our equipment and get to safety. A couple minutes go by and the sky goes dark grey and we can see the storm coming towards us.
We get all our equipment in our trailer and our computer system in the truck. At this point it has only been a few minutes but the winds are crazy and heavy rain is coming down… we know it’s only a minute left before we need to get to safety (we’ve decided that inside the truck is the best place as we are in the middle of a field and too far away from anywhere else.
Our inflatable bunkers and operation tent are secured down with pegs. We drop the tent down as far as we can and I move the truck and trailer in front of the tent so that the winds hit the truck to hopefully keep the tent from blowing away.
The winds are getting so strong that we know it’s time to head into the truck. We watch with some fear as our bunkers bend back and forth as they stay mounted to the ground, the tent is not holding up so well as it rocks back and forth (it was a cheaper pop-up one).
After what only felt like a few minutes the storm was gone and the sun was up. The bunkers all stayed in place and the tent was still standing with a small bend to a leg.
Trailers and other things in the park were not so lucky. Trees were down and the power was out. The park manager suggested that the event was over as there was no power for our system. Out comes the generator and we continue the event for the kids while the adults take care of the other issues around the park.
Was a great day, but a scary one.
One the way home we see dozens of hydro poles in half and hanging from the hydro wires. The damages of the storm are more visible as we make our way home.
