Thunder clouds look different these days.
“They’re scarier,” says Red Deer County Councillor Penny Archibald, who chased the F3 tornado that shredded the Pine Lake area on July 14, 2000.
It was just after supper. Archibald had been out in her pickup truck, checking on a troublesome intersection near her home, just east of Innisfail, when she saw the angry, black cloud that would ultimately cost 12 people their lives. She’s surprised more people and pets weren’t killed after the storm ripped through the Green Acres campground.
Boats and campers were tossed into the water. A dairy barn was flattened. A wide swath of the landscape was absolutely demolished.
While she knows of no formal plans to commemorate the disaster, Archibald plans to take a drive around the area on its 10th anniversary and reflect on the few seconds of fury that forever changed so many people’s lives, including her own.
The landscape there is almost as beautiful now as it was before the storm, says Archibald.
While the scars on the landscape have disappeared, the scars on people’s hearts remain, she says. At the same time, however, valuable lessons were learned and there was a level of reassurance found in the resourcefulness of people called upon to perform miracles in a time of crisis.
David Hofer, leader of the nearby Rainbow Hutterite colony, was out for a drive with his wife Katey when the storm hit, says Archibald. They headed straight to the Pine Lake Hub community centre to see how they could help.
Katey’s crew in the community kitchen had just finished baking fresh buns for the week ahead. She got a few hands together and organized sandwiches and coffee for the growing group of rescuers and survivors.
Prairie Bus Lines and the Chinook’s Edge School Division dusted off their school buses and started rounding up survivors from the campground, bringing them back to the Hub for shelter.
Mennonite families donated heavy equipment from their farms before the sun had set that night to start clearing debris that was blocking roads through the area.
Certainly, there were a number of problems, not the least being poor communication between various groups of people attempting to help find victims, get roads opened and sort through the rubble.
While there was a great concern for the people caught in the storm’s path, there was also considerable worry about animals, says Archibald.
Until the tornado stuck, there had been little thought about how to handle pets and livestock during a crisis, she said.
Red Deer resident Cynthia Baumgardt was among the first people to start organizing a recovery operation to locate missing animals, recognizing that people already traumatized by the storm were deeply worried about the fate of their animals.
The Red Deer animal shelter posted notices in local papers listing the pets that were still missing and offering to reconnect them with their families.
Among them, landowners Smiley and Lynne Douglas had been visited by a frightened and hungry Sheltie that was hanging around their barn but refused to be caught.
The Douglases checked the list and found that a Sheltie named Cajun had disappeared while an Edmonton couple and their teenaged daughter were being tossed around inside their holiday trailer.
The parents and daughter were hospitalized with injuries. The girl was spending the summer with an aunt in Sylvan Lake while her parents remained in treatment, says Lynne Douglas.
She tried various means of luring Cajun, but he remained elusive and would did not appear at all when the girl and her aunt came out to the farm on the Labour Day weekend to try to pick him up.
Sure enough, he showed up just as they were leaving. Douglas remembers sitting in her winter coveralls in a cold barn, trying to in vain to entice the dog with wieners. He finally relented and met her in her driveway, acting as if they were old friends.
Douglas was then able to check his tag and ensure she had the right dog before calling the family to come back and get him. Dog and owners had a tearful reunion, and the girl was clearly grateful to have him back, says Douglas. A vet checked him over and found the formerly overweight dog had lost a tooth and bit of body fat, but was in good shape over all, she says.
But the family turned their back on Pine Lake at that point, vowing never to return. Douglas sent them a Christmas card but hasn’t heard from them since.