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The old saying goes: “There’s a first time for everything.”
For Aussies Lewis Bothe and Henry Coupland, it rang true at Craven on Saturday and Sunday nights. They were taking in Country Thunder for the first time, only to witness back-to-back, powerful prairie storms each night.
“We got about an inch of rain, and 150-kilometre-per-hour winds, it felt like,” Bothe said.
The Saturday night thunder-and-lightning show forced music festival organizers to cut Travis Tritt’s show short and outright cancel Tim McGraw’s performance in light of safety concerns.
On Sunday, hail and strong winds ripped through the camping and concert sites. Headliner Chris Stapleton went ahead with his show, but organizers and RCMP members rounded up concert-goers at the main grandstand and put them onto buses for safety.
“We didn’t have the bloody tornado warning issued, but it felt like it was a tornado,” Bothe said of the strong Sunday winds. “My tent’s missing … I was in a tent; I ended up in car (for shelter).”
Craven festival-goers leave the country music festival site amid water and mud-covered camping spots on July 15, 2019. (Evan Radford/980 CJME)
Saturday’s thunder and lightning was just as impressive, he said.
“There was a s—load of bloody lightning,” he said. “There was a fair bit of that going on.”
The pair was among a huge mass of people leaving the festival site Monday morning and afternoon.
Environment Canada meteorologist Natalie Hasell confirmed that the weather agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Craven, starting at 11:25 Sunday night. It didn’t end until 1:09 Monday morning.
By about 10 a.m. Monday, groups of families and friends were packing up their tents, trailers and fifth-wheelers and pulling themselves out of the muddy, grass-covered campsites.
Some were in better spots than others.
Janice Halabura was packing up after her 32nd music festival.
“Last night (Sunday) was probably one of the worst I’d ever seen, all the years,” she said. “Compared to other years, we’ve never had a storm like that, where people were told to get out of the beer gardens (and) to get out of the grandstand.”
Hasell said Environment Canada doesn’t have data specifically from Craven, because there isn’t a weather station there.
But she did say severe thunderstorm warnings are issued when it’s probable that wind speeds will reach and surpass 90 km/h, hail at least two centimetres in diameter will be falling and/or heavy rainfall is expected.
Bothe, Halabura and others all confirmed there was hail late Sunday night.
As for getting out of the mud Monday morning, plenty of people had to make sure they didn’t drive their trucks and campers through low-lying, muddy and soiled tracks.
Craven festival-goers leave the country music festival site amid water and mud-covered camping spots on July 15, 2019. (Evan Radford/980 CJME)
Nick Gienow said he and his friends tried to help haul out a few stuck campers; one attempt didn’t quite work.
“Just coming out today, with all the mud, we had a tow cable snap right in half from pulling somebody out,” he said.
This year was his third time at the country music festival.
“No regrets,” he said, despite the nasty weather and the sloppy mud.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Devin Pugh said there weren’t any injuries reported on Saturday or Sunday nights as a result of the storms.
He also reported that over the course of the festival, Mounties dealt with 160 calls for service, laid 27 charges and held 46 people in custody.
Most calls were alcohol-related, Pugh said.
He added that there weren’t any reported sexual assaults.