Prime time in Tornado Alley.
It was a Sunday evening, last Aug. 26, in Northwood, N.D., 30 miles southwest of Grand Forks. Marjorie and David Thompson were in the family room watching TV with their son.
The sky had been ominous all evening and right from the moment Marjorie switched on the TV tornado warning signals ran across the bottom of the screen. Fierce lightening flashed, and it came as no surprise when the warning highlighted Grand Forks County, the area around Northwood.
Last Saturday's tornado south of Niverville between Kleefeld and Otterburne came close to houses in the area.
"It beeps and shows all of the counties, how severe it is and where the tornado has been," said Marjorie. "The television had been warning us for quite a while, hours actually, that there were tornadoes heading our direction. Pretty soon on the TV they were worried about this cell right over Northwood."
At 8:40 p.m., Northwood's warning siren blew. The Thompsons took cover in the basement. Ten minutes later, the tornado ripped across town.
Their house was spared, but the tornado destroyed several houses, some businesses and a trailer park. In spite of the TV warnings and the town siren, one trailer park resident was killed and several others injured,
"There was no excuse for people not knowing. The television had been warning for hours, and our city siren went off about 10 minutes or so before it hit," said Marjorie. "People should be really well aware of what's happening. They do a wonderful job (of warning us). They really do."
* * *
Eight months later, last Saturday to be precise, on another summer evening in Tornado Alley, Shirley Bernardin was on the phone in her home in Otterburne when her eldest daughter ran into the house, screaming. She had spotted a black funnel cloud.
Bernardin stepped out the door, saw the twister about a mile away and hustled her five foster children and a granddaughter into the basement.
"It came out of nowhere. It was like -- there it is!" said Bernardin, who experienced a tornado in Elie nearly 30 years ago. "I knew it could turn at any time."
The tornado touched down south of Niverville between Otterburne and Kleefield shortly before 5 p.m. There were no injuries or reported damage.
But there could have been, and it could have been devastating.
There was no warning.
* * *
Tornado forecasts and warnings are dramatically different, depending on which side of the 49th parallel you call home. The U.S. has better tornado forecasting and warning systems. The Americans have more radars, storm chasers, weather offices and emergency co-ordinators. Their radars update more frequently with better resolution. Canadian forecasters can only watch with envy.
The U.S. has far more tornadoes and more deaths. That's a big part of the reason why the American system is superior. In Canada, a proposed national forecast and warning system is stalled in the planning. The consensus is it will take a number of deaths to jar Ottawa into action. Cynical as it may be, that assessment is borne out by the Alberta experience. After a tornado in 1987 took 27 lives, the Alberta government acted quickly to introduce a warning system far better than any other in Canada.
Manitoba lags behind Alberta and away behind neighbouring North Dakota.
"We're forecasting for as big an area as the entire Midwest U.S," said Jay Anderson, a veteran Environment Canada meteorologist of 32 years who retired from the bureaucracy three years ago and now teaches at the University of Manitoba. The Winnipeg office forecasts for both Saskatchewan and Manitoba, while there are two offices in North Dakota focused on that state alone.
"When they (the U.S.) have a severe outbreak, they have a forecaster watching every radar. We have one forecaster watching nine radars...and they have more radars," Anderson added.
Pat Slattery, a spokesperson for the central region of the U.S. National Weather service, says American meteorologists have been able since the early '90s to detect tornadoes even before they completely form.
"We can issue warnings well in advance. I think our lead time is 15 to 16 minutes before a tornado touches down," Slattery said.
That 16 minutes saves lives. North of the border, meteorologists still rely on spotters to call in tornado sightings. On radar, meteorologists can see if a storm cell has rotation, but they can't confirm whether a tornado has touched down.
"The radar will never tell you 100 per cent yes or no that a tornado is occurring within a particular thunderstorm cell," said Rob Paola, an Environment Canada Warning Preparedness meteorologist. "Unless we get an eyewitness report, we don't know for sure if a tornado is occurring with that cell."
The Americans are global experts in forecasting because of the frequency of tornadoes in the U.S.
"They get 1,200 of them a year. We get 43 in Canada (10 in Manitoba), so naturally you develop the ability to forecast weather systems you see more often," Anderson said.
Canada's biggest challenge, however, is not the technology or forecasting expertise. Anderson says Canada's software enables Manitoba to be pretty competitive with the U.S. The real difference he says, comes in how the system notifies the public of approaching dangers.
Americans, like the Thompsons in North Dakota, receive timely TV and radio warnings from the major media networks, such as NBC, CBS and Fox, many of whom employ several trained meteorologists. This means media outlets don't have to wait for the National Weather Service to alert them to severe weather.
Canadians like Shirley Bernardin are more likely to find out the hard way.
The Americans have warning co-ordinators in nearly every community who are trained to recognize severe storms. Almost every state has at least two weather offices. There are community links to get the word out, including air raid sirens.
Even with the best forecasting and warning system in the world, this spring has proved to be a deadly tornado season in the United States with more than 100 Americans dying in the early part of the season. It's been the worst U.S. tornado death toll in more than a decade.
"We always tell people it is virtually impossible to lay the blame on global warming or El Ni ±o. They have some effect, but you can hardly consider them the cause. It's just the position of different systems in the atmosphere," Slattery said.
The experts say there is no correlation between an overly active tornado season in the U.S. and what's in store for Canada this summer.
But still, concerns are heightened, in part, because of two severe tornadoes that hit Manitoba in 2006 and 2007. The 2007 tornado, which destroyed much of Elie, was rated an F5, the most severe of tornadoes.
"Elie was a real eye opener because we realized we do get the strongest level of tornadoes, and they can hit something. We are different than the Americans in the way we look after these things," says Anderson. "We have to build a warning notification system that goes along with the Canadian personality on these things."
Fortunately -- even miraculously -- nobody died in Elie. But a woman was killed by the smaller twister that swept through Gull Lake the year before.
Paul White, a spokesperson for the province says the government is still looking at the recommendations put forward by a "severe weather working group" in February.
White also noted that Manitoba has long called for a nation wide warning system dubbed CanAlert. It would broadcast weather warnings by Blackberries, cell phones, the Internet and perhaps community sirens as well as by traditional means such as mandatory television and radio broadcasts.
But little progress appears to have been made, and White says there is no specific timeline for the project.
"There's really no change in status," White said. "It's still in kind of a development stage."
Anderson is not optimistic. He was involved in the CanAlert planning 10 years ago. He says it consists of a name and nothing else.
For Manitoba to move forward on its own, Anderson suggests it will require deaths or some enormous loss.
"That's what killing does, to put it bluntly. When you kill people, the bureaucracy evaporates and someone says 'do this', and gets it done."
selena.hinds@freepress.mb.ca
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