Tornado leaves trail of destruction in central Alberta

When Elisa Humphreys returned to her property on July 1, she said it looked like a bomb had gone off or a plane had crashed.Elisa Humphreys

Elisa Humphreys was sitting on her couch, sipping coffee and preparing for a work meeting when an Alberta tornado alert buzzed her phone on Saturday afternoon. She looked out the window of her mobile home and, peering to the west, saw dark clouds gathering in a twisting motion.

Still dressed in her pyjamas, Ms. Humphreys jumped up, grabbed her cat and dog and ran to her car. She sped off from her 143-acre property, glancing at her three horses on the way but knowing she didn’t have time to take them, too.

Ten minutes later, her home had been destroyed: “It’s shredded like confetti,” she said Sunday, near Carstairs, Alta.

The twister in central Alberta, which experts suspect is one of the province’s most powerful in the last couple of decades, left a path of destruction in its wake – injuring one woman, destroying five homes and killing more than 40 animals. Fourteen houses were damaged in total.

Most of the damage occurred in Mountain View County, between the town of Didsbury and Carstairs, about 70 kilometres north of Calgary. According to the RCMP, it extended for one to two kilometres.

The Carstairs Fire Department rescued one woman who was trapped in her basement as her home was torn down above her, RCMP Corporal Gina Slaney said in a news release. She suffered minor injuries.

Twenty-five cows and 20 chickens were killed, and one horse had to be put down, the RCMP said. Ms. Humphreys says the horse was hers.

Ms. Humphreys found a Canadian flag when she returned to the wreckage of her property.Elisa Humphreys

When she returned to her property on Saturday, Ms. Humphreys said it looked like a bomb had gone off or a plane had crashed. Bits of insulation and siding lay strewn about. Her fence was almost entirely gone, her garbage bin and horse trailer had disappeared, and nine-metre-tall trees had been ripped from the ground.

While tornadoes are common in Alberta, this was the most severe one in the province that Marianna Greenhough, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), has seen in the 18 years she has been working.

ECCC issued a tornado alert at 1:49 p.m. MT Saturday to warn residents, but it left them little time to round their animals up and hide.

“It developed so fast that there really was no heads-up time,” Ms. Greenhough said. A severe thunderstorm warning that informed about the risk of tornadoes was issued at 1:26 p.m.

In photos: Destruction left in the wake of central Alberta tornado on Saturday

Aaron Jayjack, a storm hunter based in Manitoba, had been tracking a potential tornado in central Alberta based on severe weather forecasts, so he drove there. He couldn’t nail down the exact location and time of the storm until Saturday by using a radar app.

Nearing lunchtime, he saw a storm forming that suddenly “exploded in growth and intensity. … It was an incredibly dirty trail of a dirt sucker tornado.” He said he saw cattle, trees and debris being blended into the funnel.

Vehicles sit amidst a tornado-damaged home near Carstairs.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press

The town of Didsbury is leading the cleanup of the disaster’s aftermath, according to Hunter Baril, press secretary for Alberta’s Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services, but the province is “always on standby to step in, if needed.”

All damages from the disaster are considered insurable and do not qualify for the province’s disaster recovery funding, which would only go to the affected municipalities, Mr. Baril said.

Ms. Humphreys, whose mobile home isn’t insured, said the loss is hard to take, but that she was heartened Sunday by the appearance of dozens of volunteers at her property.

“I think somehow or another there’s a way forward from this,” she said.

The July 1 tornado was “probably one of the most powerful tornadoes in the last couple of decades in Alberta,” said David Sills, executive director of Northern Tornadoes Project, an initiative at the University of Western Ontario that detects as well as shares and documents data for twisters in Canada. They currently have a team on scene assessing the damages and are working together with ECCC.

It was the strongest twister since Northern Tornadoes Project began their work in 2017 and may have placed higher than an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning wind speeds were likely faster than 220 kilometres an hour.

The Enhanced Fujita scale goes from zero at the weakest to five at the strongest based on wind speeds of tornadoes as estimated by the damage caused, Mr. Sills explained.

So far this year, Alberta had 13 tornadoes, with 10 of them happening in a single day on June 14.