It took a July 4 tornado mere seconds to topple monuments that have marked graves in St. Andrew’s Cemetery for nearly a century.
Thursday, it took a crew of two from Remco Memeorials in Regina a day to return most of the grave markers to an upright position.
The company has some experience putting headstones to rights, mostly due to vandalism, said Jay Carnall, production operations manager with Remco Memorials in Regina.
He said this was the first time he had to re-erect monuments due to a tornado and never so many at once.
Carnall and fellow Remco employee Michael Schlosser, an installer, spent most of Thursday restoring the headstones. The process involves propping up the heavy granite stones and then putting straps around them so a hydraulic boom truck can carry the weight of the stone, some weighing 1,000 pounds and then lower it onto its base.
A few of the stones, mostly old weathered marble monuments that had their crucifixes that adorned them snapped off, will have to be replaced. Carnall said the marble is like powder and difficult to repair.
Gerard Zdunich, a member the St. Andrew’s Cemetery committee, said it will be up to families to repair or replace monuments that Remco was unable to fix. One of the affected marble monuments belongs to his great-grandmother.
Zdunich and St. Andrew’s Cemetery committee appreciates Carnall and Schlosser’s work at the cemetery. Remco volunteered its services, free of charge.
“Kenaston has always dealt with Remco and we wanted to help out, give back and do our part,” Carnall said.
Zdunich said others are pitching in as well. Locals are repairing the gates and he said they will try and do something with the spruce trees that were pushed over.
Zdunich had watched the tornado from his farm about two miles north of Kenaston.
He said it came from the west. When it reached Highway 11, the twister turned south, following the highway and then crossed the highway, turned east and headed straight for St. Andrew’s Cemetery. The tornado knocked over spruce trees and toppled 45 granite and marble monuments before it brought down the gates and metal arch marking the cemetery entrance. It then skipped across Highway 15, plowed through a tree row and then was gone.
“All we can say is how lucky it missed the village and that farm,” Zdunich says, pointing to the farmyard of Matt and Lynne Yelich that sits across the road.
He is grateful no one was hurt.
“Some of the stones (the tornado toppled) are 800 pounds, some are even bigger, think of the force. What would it do to you or to me?”