Elie tornado strongest ever in Canada

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/09/2007 (6864 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.

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, 58. “Tornadoes aren’t common in Canada. Not an F5.”

And yet, weather experts refused to believe the Elie tornado by itself 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 Fukita damage scale rates tornadoes according to the amount of damage they do. Environment Canada officials studied video of the Elie tornado, which destroyed buildings, and used the relative structural soundness of those 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. Unlike tornadoes, hurricanes, which take place over open water, can become more frequent as ocean temperatures rise, Hanesiak said, a phenomenon widely recorded by global warming proponents.

The Elie tornado did not even signal the Canadian Prairies are becoming part of Tornado Alley, the name attributed to a swath of the central United States where tornadoes are commonplace, Carlsen and Hanesiak said.

“We always were,” said Carlsen. “We’re kind of Tornado Alley North, the northern extension of Tornado Alley. It’s just that there’s more attention paid to the tornadoes farther south because there’s more population.”

Hollywood has also helped solidify the U.S. plains as the home of Tornado alley through films such as ‘Twister,’ Carlsen said.

“’The Wizard of Oz’ even,” he added.

joe.paraskevas@freepress.mb.ca