Alberta tornado causes major scare for residents as clean-up continues

Clean-up continues after one of the largest tornadoes Alberta has seen in almost half-a-century touched down near Didsbury on Canada Day — and residents are sharing their stories of the terrifying event.

Rhondalee MacDonald was working inside Maesie’s Nook in Didsbury, only a few kilometers away from where the twister formed, when the strange weather started to roll in.

“I popped outside on the deck to clean off some tables and there was complete silence, it was very eerie — there was no birds singing there was literally no wind like it wasn’t a crazy windy day but there was nothing; like it was beyond an eerie silence, it was a deafening silence,” she said.

Environment and Climate Change Canada {ECCC} says the system produced an EF4 classified tornado, creating the worst damage along Highway 2A between Didsbury and Carstairs.

It was on the ground for almost 30 minutes along a 15 kilometre path. The maximum windspeed is estimated at 275 km/h.

Damages have been surveyed by Environment Canada and the Northern Tornado Project.

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“[The organizations], in collaboration, reviewed all the damages that they saw, based on that, that is how the ranking is done based on the damage that was done by the wind, the wind speed indicates how strong the tornado was and that’s how the ef4 ranking came about,” explained ECCC meteorologist Terri Lang.

The last time Alberta saw an EF4 tornado was in 1987 in Edmonton, there were fatalities in that tornado. But, this time an alert sent to cell phones helped to warn of the incoming risk.

“The other difference is it went through a fairly sparsely populated area, compared to the one that went through in Edmonton,” Lang explained. “I mean that went through some heavily populated areas so when that happened then the probability that more injury and deaths will occur goes up.”

People have been sharing their stories at Maesie’s Nook, and MacDonald says she has been trying to make things feels normal for those affected while showing that she cares.

“Because we’re such a base community like we have our town, but we have our family on the outskirts of town, so a lot of praying was happening too because we just didn’t, we didn’t know, when we heard the sirens, we knew that it wasn’t good,” she said.

There were no fatalities as a result of the tornado, but it damaged 12 homes — seven of which cannot be lived in.

Livestock was also lost.

“But the community in a whole pulling together and helping that’s what the most important right now is that we can help get them a little of what they’ve lost,” MacDonald said.