Elie tornado strongest in Canadian history

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/09/2007 (6828 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A tornado that struck Elie in June was the strongest in Canadian history, Environment Canada reported Tuesday.

The tornado was the first in this country to be labelled F5, the most severe reading on a widely used damage scale, the government weather service said. A 1987 tornado that blew through an area of Edmonton and killed 27 people was rated an F4.

The news was no surprise to Clayton Manness, the president of Prairie Flour Mill Ltd. The twister destroyed some of the company’s buildings.

Manness said they are still trying to rebuild, but are grateful that no one was at the mill the night the storm hit.

“It was the first Friday night in two months we didn’t have anyone there,” he said.

Roland Rasmussen, reeve of the RM of Cartier, vividly recalled the devastating swath the tornado cut on the outskirts of Elie. Rasmussen arrived in Elie an hour after the storm hit.

“I drove through there and it was like someone set off a huge bomb and blew everything up,” he said.

Rasmussen said three out of the four families who lost their homes are now starting to rebuild from scratch. He said there’s been no discussion about erecting a dedication sign to the storm in town, and is unsure if boasting of the strongest tornado in Canadian history is “something to be proud of.”

In Elie, where the tornado destroyed property but didn’t claim any lives, rattled residents are wondering if the event signalled the onset of climate change, said Linda Aquin, a 33-year resident of the town 30 kilometres west of Winnipeg.

“Personally, I would connect it to climate change,” said Aquin. “Tornadoes aren’t common in Canada. Not an F5.”

And yet, weather experts refuse to believe the Elie tornado was a result of climate change, a theory of global warming that many environmentalists espouse.

“The jury’s out on that one,” said Dave Carlsen, Warning Preparedness meteorologist at Environment Canada in Winnipeg. “When we look at violent tornadoes, F3 to F5, over the last bunch of years, over the last 50 years, they’ve pretty much stayed constant.

“What we are seeing is just that it’s the luck of the draw that this one actually happened to hit something,” Carlsen added. “There might have been F5s around, five, 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. But if they didn’t hit anything then they can’t be actually classified as F5s.

The Fujita damage scale rates tornadoes according to the amount of damage they do. Environment Canada officials studied video of the Elie tornado, and used the relative structural soundness of the destroyed buildings to estimate wind speed, Carlsen said. An F5 tornado brings winds of between 400 and 500 kilometres per hour, he added.

Weather experts would have difficulty connecting a single tornado to a trend that the world’s climate is changing, said John Hanesiak, associate professor in the department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba. Tornadoes are caused by various factors, Hanesiak added.

One such factor, wind shear — the change of a wind’s speed and direction within a slight change in altitude — happens frequently.

“It’s hard to attribute day-to-day variations in weather to longer-term climate-type things,” Hanesiak said.

joe.paraskevas@freepress.mb.ca

— with files from Jen Skerritt