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(Right click to open full sized images).
h/t to Larry Weber, who explains – “The pictures were taken around the Medicine Hat area after a windstorm last week. The bales apparently weigh up to 1600lbs and some were reported to have rolled up to 5 miles.”
Update – commentors advise that the photos are from 2008.
…is that like in Lethbridge where they use cinder blocks as kites?
I’ll put $5 on bale #3
It looks like some university pranksters were at it over night. Of course they had to lean into the wind at a 45degree angle to get there.
…yeah, could be air head kids. I was camping at Gull Lake last fall and kids were rolling the bales down the hills for fun, towards the campsite.
Real Smart.
The wind did that? Ok, I call bull sh..
medicine hat blows so bad that even the bales are leaving town, lol
Huh. I live in Lethbridge, and I’ve never seen that happen, probably because the farmers usually take care to stack their bales crossways to the wind. Every year the wind here flips a few trucks moving mobile homes, so I don’t see why a few nice round bales should be out of the question.
“The wind did that? Ok, I call bull sh..
Posted by: Smitherenzes at August 7, 2009 3:02 PM ”
Uhuh.Try Enviroment Canada’s website.You might learn about something called a “plow wind”,in front of advancing severe thunderstorms.These puppies can reach up to F2 tornado level,without the funnel cloud.Move a 1600lb bale?Piece of p1ss.
Made of tin…lololol
1st picture – Dammit!
A shout out to my brother (or sister) whoevr here in Lethbridge. We just caught the edge of that storm so we didn’t see that much damage. Besides if a hurricane hit here we would just figure that the Chinook was feeling a little wet that day đ
I had a girlfriend once who spent some time in Lethbridge. According to her some of the elderly she looked after were housebound by the wind, and there were days she had to make her way by clinging from lamp post to lamp post. So I can certainly believe hay bales can get rolled by a good strong wind. I sure hope they can dry out the bales that landed in the irrigation ditch.
Tumblebales?
Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them dogies rollin’
RAWHIDE!
Sorry to much coffee and dealing with irrational exuberance in the equity markets all morning is making me mental…
Great pictures. Have not seen this before.
Group of kids wouldn’t have that much energy would they? Wouldn’t take a lot of energy given the high weight of the bails. IIs it easy to roll a bail of hay that size by a person? I really have no idea, only seen machinery handling these puppies.
Looks like the real deal, unless some local wise asses know to turn them in the wrong direction at an opportune time and let mother nature take over…hmm.
ldd, on a hill they don’t take much to get rocking, but judging by the distance, that would have to been a whole class of students doing it, with some of it going uphill.
…question, would something like this be covered under crop insurance? The barley that go mowed down that is.
On the farm many years ago my brother was out in the yard got caught in that southern Alberta wind. It blew him up against the west wall of the barn for two days.We had to feed him hot dogs with a shot gun or he would have starved….. No really no s$1t
Where’s the egg? Where’s the egg?
While it is true the wind caused that, the pictures are actually from a windstorm in the area last year, the one that blasted Seven Persons and went just south of Medicine Hat, where an 80-metre anemometer measured a wind of 215 km/h. It was July 15, 2008.
So that’s why it takes an hour and a half to drive from Lethbridge to Pincher Creek, but only ten minutes to drive back?
Look at the TREND lines…two hockey sticks and crossing derivatives…The bales at rest form a Pyramid with supporting attributes.
Bring on the Model-building monkeys; this is obviously a message sent by nature to help complete the AGW final calculations (a slight modification factor) The Carbon Plough Factor TheoryâŠThis Plough Factor is bigger than Gore & Dizzy Lizzy
Of course any trend, & by definition, are for the true believers.. Could be as silly as AGW
Hey, you kids! Get the “F” off my lawn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLMLxdyLsQk
So that’s why I’ve never met anyone from The Hat who owns a Smart Car!
Those plow winds occur in Ontario in front of thunder-dunders…..
Dad would get us to get the barn doors shut well ahead…..apparently those winds have caused fatalities with barn doors etc…..no joke.
Last year saw a load of those Big Bales upset by such a breeze…..not a witness….saw the results…same wind messed up a tarp barn—bigtime…..write-off…..that’s why we have wind insurance….
And you call Saskatchewan flat?? Ha!
When the round bales first made their appearance in Alberta I went for a drive after one wind storm. I suspect that the farmer didn’t use enough twine but the wind unrolled about half the bales in one field. The only bales not unrolled were cross wise to the wind.
While it is true the wind caused that, the pictures are actually from a windstorm in the area last year, the one that blasted Seven Persons and went just south of Medicine Hat, where an 80-metre anemometer measured a wind of 215 km/h. It was July 15, 2008.
Posted by: Johann at August 7, 2009 6:10 PM
Yah, I was thinking that it’d take at least 100 mph or bettor wind to roll them suckers
around here a 4X5 weighs about 750 lbs, and after a day in the field they flat spot, and no damn kids are going to roll that many that far
heck, I fight to roll them off a wagon, parked on a incline, when I bring them home
Kind of reminds me of snowrollers. I saw this happen this past winter here in NL.
is there an implication here of renewable energy?
never mind
One person can roll a round bale, but it isn’t easy. Wind will only roll them downhill. I’ve seen this before, just north of Grande Prairie. Almost every bale in the field had rolled up against the fence, on the east side of the field.
I’ve also seen snowballs formed by chinook winds. If the wind hits, just as the temp. goes above zero, it’ll pick up a drop of water, and roll it. If the drop picks up a bit of snow, it’ll keep rolling (downhill only).
Oz- There are a few smart cars in Medicine Hat. My employee got chased by a guy in a smart car. The guy went squirrelly when my guy passed him on the highway in his 4X4. From what I was told, it was pretty funny.
On another note, it’s been frigging cold in Medicine Hat. There’s been no summer. It only got above 30 maybe 2 or 3 days. It usually hits 35 for almost a month.
Smitherenzes…
YOU obviously have never experienced a ‘light Saskatchewan breeze’…no bull sh** !! (Kate…’splain ‘im plse !!)
It’s probably the momentum once they get going. wind insurance? ha! I live near Chicago…should I get that?
oh…never mind..wrong kind of wind.
Worse yet…someone is going to have to drive with a tractor and wagons through the grain crop to pick those bales up and get them out of there before they can combine the grain. What a mess.
I wonder if we could convince the econuts that the giant fans moved those bales?
well one certainly would be ill advised to spit in the wind in Medicine Hat.
is this related to crop circles? they’re showing up in Russia now . . .
I was coming back to the Hat from Havre , Motana once on my Harley . It’s pretty much straight north and south on the #41 . We had to ride on about a 45 degree angle most of the way to stay on the highway . It was a tad scary when you met another vehicle .
I have these pictures from last summer, it was from a tornado
You see thatâs how they make all those crop circles,
They get Iggy to blow a bale around with hot air. Of course someone else plans the design; this was his first solo attempt in Mad Hat.
Rob C, you have been in the coffee shop in Vauxhall too long.
Reminds me of a video documenting “Les SuĂȘte” in Cheticamp, Cape Breton. Extremely high winds. I bought the video (and sent it to relatives from the area) but can’t find a reference to it on the web now.
There I was thinking these were Toronto’s contribution to public art.
ldd, tomax – 1600 lbs? That’s nothing – I’ve seen two guys push a 3500 lb car up a slight incline. Once you get it moving, you’re only fighting friction. Haven’t you seen those “world’s strongest men” pulling an airplane? It takes some effort to overcome the inertia, which is the hard part, but the job gets easier after that.
Actually these pictures reminded me of when we were kids, when a common breakfast was “Muffets” – a disk of shredded wheat. People seem to prefer the spoon sized version these days.
One day, as we were driving to our cottage in Quebec, we passed a field filled with circular bales. My little brother asked “What are those?”. With a straight face, I told him those were Muffets before they were shrunk and put in the box. “Oh” he nodded, and sat back in his seat. Ah, big brothers – what would the world be like without them?
Round things roll, film at 11.
So the Bales were blown in 2008 and it took them this long to arrive?
Pretty slow for Alberta.
I’ve been hit by a plough wind.
We were at Hecla Island watching the late afternoon sun on the West side when we saw a squall line on the far side coming up to the shore.
You could see the opposite shore turn black and the trees flatten ahead of the downpour. When the wind hit the water it turned white.
It took less than 60 seconds to cross a 3 mile stretch of water …. pushed me up 20 feet of steep embankment. I was running up a 55 degree slope with that wind pushing me from the rear.
A trip around after showed the entire island was littered with snapped treetops. Lucky no one was hurt.
It was only two years ago that a plough wind flatted thousands of acres of trees in the Whiteshell area. They are still cleaning up after that.
9 years ago in Fargo there was a plough wind that ripped up the west side of Fargo and just about took the roof of the Holiday Inn…. semis turned over on the highway etc.
I’ve seen grainaries toppled and blown, sheds and equipment buildings flipped off the foundations. Acres of bush flattened and so on. I’ve seen these things everywhere in Canada as well. Although in the Arctic you’d be hard pressed to notice anything except a shifted building.
What is unusual about that Medicine Hat wind is that it lasted long enough to get the bales momentum up and push them that far.
They could be carried by a european sparrow . . .
I wrote: Reminds me of a video documenting “Les SuĂȘte”…
Found it. http://www.blackriver.ns.ca/suetes.html
+++++
25:50 minutes, 1999.
Produced, written, & directed by Neal Livingston.
Available on DVD.
This documentary traces the folklore, stories, and reality of living under the hurricane force winds, that beat down upon the residents of the Acadian region of Western Cape Breton Island, between Margaree Harbour and Cheticamp. The film contains stunning landscapes shot in winds of 130 miles per hour.
While there is often serious damage from these SuĂȘtes, roofs blowing off buildings and even homes blowing apart, there is also a good dose of local humour surrounding life under these harsh environmental conditions. Residents from young to more than 90 years old tell their tales of life under these winds.
On the comic side artist Michel Williatte-Battet is hilarious as he attempts to hang up the laundry at 130 mph, read a newspaper outside, or just get in and out of his car and into and out of his house.
SuĂȘtes was financed by Telefilm Canada, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, and Black River Productions Limited. The French version was produced with assistance from the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund. SuĂȘtes was produced with the financial participation of ATV in Atlantic Canada, CFCF TV in Quebec, ONtv in Ontario, and SCN in Saskatchewan.
“I recently had the pleasure of viewing Neal Livingston’s 1999 film entitled SuĂȘtes. … I’m not sure if Livingston has a knack for making his subjects relax in front of the camera or if he purposely used footage of his less camera-shy interviewees, for all the people who told their stories relayed them in a relaxed and unfeigned manner. Often (his) camera would go into their living rooms, giving the film a down-to-earth tone. … SuĂȘtes is another highly original film from Livingston. I imagine documentaries about wind are primarily scientific and do not delve into the cultural impacts of the wind. I doubt many are as funny as SuĂȘtes.”
— Shunpiking Magazine, Feb/Mar, 2000.
==========
See also http://homepage.mac.com/vicmf/cb/essays/10/images/19.html
According to this web site, the area around ChĂ©ticamp is one of two in the world (the other is Wreck House, Newfoundland) where suĂȘtes, vicious hurricane-force wind storms, are found. A suĂȘte occurs when southeasterly winds get trapped between warmer fronts of air and the surface of the adjacent mountains, forcing them up over and then down under high pressure, an effect rather like putting your thumb over the end of a fast-flowing water hose and causing the water to spray out with force. In the case of a suĂȘte, the winds have been clocked at 240 km/h (150 mph). Homes built in this area have to take special precautions to prevent them from being damaged during the suĂȘtes. One therefore often sees houses with slanted roofs to the south-east and with few or no openings to the wind in that direction. Even the Ăglise St-Pierre was not immune: Father Chiasson relates[1] how, some fifteen years after it was built, its steeple was carried off in a suĂȘte, tossing its heavy iron cross off into the distance; the steeple is now anchored by four large steel cables attached to the southeast walls of the church.
Update: the producer emailed me to mention that a clip is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oV4lt-RFTI
This is video of violent wind, doesn’t include interviews with residents or any dialog.
Does it qualify as a hurricane?
Perhaps the alien children got bored with crop circles and decided to have a little fun bale tipping. (sarc)
That’s how the rockies got started. The wind would pick up a small round stone after a wind storm in S. Alberta, the stone would pick up mud, and roll, and roll, and roll and roll. Honest!!
I wonder how many cousins I lost…
My family on my Dad’s side is all from the Hat. Actually, my Dad grew up in Redcliff which is now a suburb of the Hat (it only had about 6000 people when my Dad lived there.) Hard to believe the Hat is now large enough to have a suburb.
Suffice it to say the last time I drove through the Hat I was astounded to see how much it has grown since I was a kid. It’s amazing what an oil boom will do to the wealth of a community.
Too bad leftards still think prosperity is a function of lazing around on your arse waiting for the “free” government money…