Two Yorkton residents filled an inflatable boat with clothes from their home and then headed for higher ground after floodwaters deluged the city last week. (Dani Mario/CBC)

Saskatchewan is pleading for anyone with "a strong back and a willing heart" to help the province dig out from a series of devastating storms.

Duane McKay, the province's fire commissioner, says the Saskatchewan Emergency Management Organization has pulled in all its resources to deal with disasters across Saskatchewan.

But McKay says volunteers are needed to move debris in Yorkton, where about 1,000 homes were damaged after heavy rain flooded basements and turned streets into canals last Thursday.

Volunteers are needed to help people "restore their lives a little bit," McKay said in a conference call Monday.

"A strong back and a willing heart is probably what we're needing right now. It's basically removing whatever was in somebody's basement out and into dumpsters to be transported out or trying to salvage those things," he said.

The flood has forced about 175 people from their homes.

The water has receded but the damage is still being assessed. McKay said there is "an increased level of emotion" as people try to cope with the disaster.

"People are more concerned now about, 'What do I do next' and so we're seeing that begin to come forward in the community."

States of emergency

Yorkton residents aren't alone with their worries. More than 70 Saskatchewan communities have declared states of emergency due to bad weather.

Severe flooding last month in Maple Creek, in southwestern Saskatchewan, flooded basements and collapsed a portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. Last Wednesday, Saskatoon had what its mayor called "one of those one-in-100-year floods" when the city received 80 millimetres of rain in three hours.

At least 100 people have been left homeless near the town of Raymore and on the Kawacatoose First Nation, where a tornado touched down Friday.

Emergency officials said well over a dozen homes are in ruins or badly damaged on the reserve, along with four farms in the region.

Environment Canada has surveyed the damage and determined it was an F3 tornado on the Fujita tornado damage scale, which means winds were roaring as high as 330 kilometres an hour. The scale has a maximum rating of F5.

Meteorologist Dan Kulak said in a conference call Monday that the twister was about 500 metres wide, cut a path 45 kilometres long — crossing two highways — and may have been on the ground for as long as one hour.

"That would be a fairly lengthy storm," said Kulak.

"Typically tornadoes will be on the ground for only a few minutes, but the odd time you do get these storms which do last a considerable amount of time and cover a lot of distance. So a one-hour tornado on the ground that peaks at an F3 is an unusual storm. It's not an extremely, extremely rare event but certainly it is in the less common end of things."

Kulak said F3 tornadoes probably occur once every two to three years on Prairies.

Prior tornado was deadly

It was an F3 tornado that carved a 20-kilometre path of destruction through an Alberta campground on July 14, 2000. The twister at Pine Lake killed 12 people and injured more than 100.

Residents near Raymore and on the Kawacatoose First Nation say it's a miracle that no one was killed or even seriously injured during the tornado Friday.

Kulak said "it's been wave after wave" of storms across the Prairies.

The meteorologist said he doesn't have a specific forecast through to the end of August, but he suggested there might be more bad weather to come.

"Certainly if history is going to be any indication of the future here, when we do get into patterns like this — a lot of rain and a lot moisture that happens to be in the area — you're that much more susceptible to further thunderstorm activity," said Kulak.

"You tend to recycle. A lot of that moisture, as it evaporates during the day, becomes fuel for the next set of storms."