Up to nine homes were damaged by a tornado in west-central Alberta on Thursday afternoon, say RCMP.
RCMP Cpl. Gina Slaney said no one was seriously hurt and everyone was accounted for in the impact zone southeast of Sundre.
Slaney said the tornado hit at about 3 p.m. and police from Sundre, Airdrie, Olds and Didsbury, and a fire crew from Cremona, went door to door to check on people.
The Town of Olds activated its Emergency Coordination Centre, and a reception centre was set up at the Sportsplex to register anyone needing assistance. But the storm passed without further issues, and the emergency centre was quickly demobilized.
Environment and Climate Change Canada says it received its first report of a funnel cloud/tornado near Bergen around 2:32 p.m., and the last report near Shantz around 3:10 p.m. as the thunderstorm moved to the east.
Related:
Tornado watch in effect for Red Deer
The tornado touched down east of Bergen, and Brandon Morisseau, with @PrairieChasers, saw the tornado in action.
He said the tornado was on the ground for about 30 minutes, and much of that time it was hidden by rain making it an even bigger threat.
“A curtain of rain can actually go around the tornado and shroud it. That’s what happened yesterday. It became rain-wrapped. You couldn’t see it for quite some time and that’s a very dangerous thing,” Morisseau said.
TORNADO earlier near Bergen, Alberta #abstorm @PrairieChasers pic.twitter.com/75SISDNlHM
— Braydon Morisseau (@BraydonMoreSo) July 8, 2022
He said it ended up snapping a lot of trees and a couple of houses sustained severe damage. Weather officials have yet to rate the tornado, which is based on how much the storm eats.
Mark Simpson, with @TwistedChasers, said from the amount of damage he saw, it may be rated an EF2 on a scale of 0 to 5. The tornado was on the ground for about three km, and damage stretched about five-km wide.
“There was one house with a metal roof that got part of it peeled off. There was one house, or shack, that was completely buried in trees that fell on top of it. There was a pretty substantial amount of damage,” Simpson said.
A trailer that got wrapped around a tree was so mangled it was hard to tell what kind of trailer it was, he added.
Simpson said he spoke to a couple driving in the area who got caught in the storm, couldn’t see where they were going, but luckily pulled over just outside the edge of the tornado.
“They were getting hammered with hail and rain and they thought they were going to die. Had they gone any further, they probably wouldn’t be here. They would have been swept off the road,” Simpson said.
Related:
Tornado warning issued near Castor
He said about 30 to 40 storm chasers were in the area monitoring the storm.
Both Morisseau and Simpson said storm chasers do what they do to provide accurate information to weather officials about what’s happening on the ground.
Simpson said radar equipment in Edmonton and Strathmore doesn’t provide important storm details in rural areas like Bergen.
“The radar doesn’t actually show the rotation of the storm down at ground level at that distance. Often Environment Canada will warn of a tornado, but without the storm chasers, they don’t know it’s in contact with the ground,” Simpson said.
Morisseau expected active weather to continue for a couple of weeks.
“It does appear we’ll get our first high-pressure ridge going into next week so that’s when we’ll get some pretty hot temperatures and that will cook it up more.”
— with files from The Canadian Press
szielinski@reddeeradvocate.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter