Storm - July 2011

This will be a light day for me (as far as writing goes), I’ll be posting about a freak storm that hit our camp ground in July 2011.

Saturday July, 16^th we had family members, on my wife's side, visiting. Jocelyne and André, who are RV fulltimer, were coming and her cousin and his wife, Alain and Johanne, whom my wife had not seen since her teens.

Johanne, I, Jocelyne and André

Alain

The next picture is our travelling trailer which is located just behind our model park trailer. Look at the trees, there are a lot of mature trees on this camping.

This was a splendid day, and the camping was full. There were kids all over the place, riding bike, at the beach, doing what kids know best… having fun.

Sunday July 17th, more sun, not a breeze... We left around 15:00, because we worked the following day. We needed to do some laundry and grocery to be ready for the week.

We went to bed around 9:30, we are earlier risers! Around 11:00 pm, the phone rang, you know those phone when you are sleeping are always bad news! Our friend, Suzanne, called to tell us that there had been a strom that hit the camping. She told me: "Richard I thought we were going to die". It happened around 7:30, she was sitting by a trailer drinking a glass of wine. She told me that she felt a couple of rain drops and by the time she deposited the glass on the table... all hell broke loose. Trees were going down all over, people were screeming but there was so much noise they couldn't even hear themselves.

She told me that there was no electricity and water. Their trailer was fine, she inspected our trailers and except for the awning on the travel trailer, there seems to be no damage. But, a lot of persons were not so lucky.

Our trailer - the pine tree on the right fell.. Not a scatch for us!

Our friends Lise and Terry, had had this sun roof for only a month! 

Our travel trailer not touched either!

The awning is brocken!

Looks like a war zone!

67 years old men was trying to bring his car in safely!

Tree went through

Was pushed from its blocks.

Look at the size of the pine and how close it was to our trailer

Except for one 67 year old man, most people that were still in the campground were unharmed... couple of stitches, and some bruisings. That is physically, but, there are still a lot of people that were traumatized by this storm.

The 67 year old man tried to bring his car outside the campground so that nothing would hit the car. It's the black car in the picture, he was stuck in his seat, unconcious. Some people, got him outside the car, they couldn't wait for rescue. And they brought him to the front office, he had regained conciousness. He couldn't move his legs. After a long while, the ambulance showed up and brought him to the hospital. In the hospital, his heart stopped, they got it started again. It seems that he was brain dead. Last week, he died!

We called our employer and didn't go to work on Monday. As soon as there was light, we drove back to the camping. Everyone that was there were working, going around helping others, helping the camping crew with the cleaning. There were a lot of tears, a lot of helping, a lot of sharing and lots of hugs.

If that storm happened one day earlier, there would have been a lot of victims, so lucky we were!

Afterward, every times that we heard a storm approaching, we could see cars hurrying back to the front office...   

I have more picture at :  https://picasaweb.google.com/116435006350188378799/StormJuly2011LacVert#