Any memories of the '87 Tornado in Edmonton?

[towerguy3]

Can anyone share their memories of the '87 Tornado in Edmonton?

It was the worst in Canadian history, at least 20 dead and a locomotive pushed over. I recall Lawrence Decour was your Mayor then and the Oilers were an awesome team...

Did the temperature really drop from 30 C to 5 C in only a few minutes? How did the sky look? Know anyone who was injured? Apparently it hit F3.

[Coldrsx]

^i have a few...

We flew over the tornado that day and had a bird's eye view...i moved here from Ottawa the hour it hit the city.

We couldnt get to our new house in the SW because the road was flooded for 2 days.

...but most importantly...we were moving here because my father had just been appointed the director general of the Prairies for environment Canada...basically the head of the weather service. When we got off the plane, he was taken immediately to "the office" and i didnt see him for 3-4 days as he had to do damage control, assessment, and media.

July 31, 1987 is truly a day that has a lifelong tie to myself and my family.

[SHOFEAR]

I remember giant hail and my father yelling when my mother got to close to the bay window in the kitchen. I was three and it is my first memory.

We drove in from Calgary an hour or so before it hit and my parents have always said the clouds along the highway were out of this world.

[newfangled]

We were coming back from a family vacation in Hawaii. We circled the airport for a long time before landing - it seemed like hours, but I was a kid so what did I know? We finally landed, got our luggage and got in the car. It was raining, but we didn't know anything was going on.

A few minutes later we're driving down highway 2 and my dad asks "What's that?"

We look out the backwindow to see a funnel cloud that's probably a few kms behind us, and we're just in time to see it touch down and kick up a cloud of debris.

The rest of the drive home was pretty interesting too:

There was snow/hail on the side of the road in some areas.
There seemed to be lightning everywhere. I remember seeing multiple lightning strikes in the median between QEII N & S. That was pretty freaky.
And the underpasses on the whitemud were all partially flooded, with a fair number of abandoned cars.

[JAH]

I was about 9 yrs old at the time, didn't even know what the hell a tornado was!

I remember running outside with a bucket over my head and collecting baseball-sized hail with my cousin, and putting them in the freezer. My dad worked at AltaSteel (stelco) at the time, and his plant got hit pretty bad.

[feepa]

http://www.cbc.ca/edmonton/features/1987tornado/MT/

[feepa]

• Video Link

[TimB09]

I was three when it hit and all I remember is my Dad running outside to pick up the hail. He brought it in the house and we had it in our freezer for a week.

I also remember how intense the lightning was and how hard it was raining. We lived in Duggan at the time, close to Southgate, but we weren't to close to the tornado, although Millwoods is fairly close to us.

I heard it reached F5 in some stages. Since that tornado, I have been fascinated by tornados and want to learn more. I would ultimately like to spend a summer in the States(Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, etc.) and see some of these things develop. Crazy, I know.

[feepa]

http://www.ee.ualberta.ca/~rob/tornado87.htm

EDMONTON TORNADO 1987

This page was developed to honor those who died on July 31, 1987 in Edmonton's worst natural disaster.

Jim Allan, Sharon Denise Andruchow, Marie Jeanette Barker, Manuel Carreiro, George Demetrius, Ed Dery, Ajmer Dhaliwal, Lloyd Fankhanel, Richard Gillespie, Grant Hartfeil, Daniel Lewis, To Ly, Edito Mendosa, Clem Nault, Alfred & Etta Nolin, Graham Palmer, Mary Putnam, Kelly Pancel, Darcy Reimer, Dawn Reimer, Dianne Reimer, Marvin Reimer, Pat Robinson, Merle Shirley Rosychuk, Gregory Trabenik, Eugene Zaparyniuk.

This series of 12 photographs illustrates the development of the tornado from its start in Millwoods through to where it passed the office building I was working in on 98th avenue and 50th street. The photographs are unedited and some show reflections from the lights and blinds behind me.

Click on the photos for a larger image.

..1.....2.....3

..4.....5.....6

..7.....8.....9

..10.....11.....12

On July 31, 1987, a tornado ripped though Edmonton killing 27 people and causing 330 million dollars in property damage. I watched and photographed the tornado from the office building I was working in that afternoon. The 12 photographs I took remained in my camera for a couple of days before I had them developed. When I finally got the photographs processed, I couldn't believe the quality of the images. A number of people at work expressed an interest in getting a set of photographs and I obliged, selling a few sets and donating the proceeds to the Red Cross. One of the local newspapers caught on to the story and before I knew it, I had sold $10,000.00 worth. All the money was quietly donated to the Red Cross Tornado Relief Fund about three weeks after the disaster. I learned later that my contribution matched the largest corporate donation made to the fund. I hope my contribution helped.

[feepa]

The Edmonton Tornado was a powerful and devastating tornado that ripped through the eastern part of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and parts of neighbouring Strathcona County on the afternoon of Friday, July 31, 1987 (also known as "Black Friday" to Edmontonians).
The tornado remained on the ground for an hour, cutting a path of destruction 40 kilometres (25 miles) long and up to a kilometre (0.6 miles, or 3000 feet) wide in places, and peaking at F4[1] on the Fujita scale, but may have briefly become an F5[3]. The tornado killed 27 people, injured more than 300 people, destroyed more than 300 homes, and caused more than $330 million in property damage at four major disaster sites. The loss of life, injuries and destruction of property made it the worst natural disaster in Alberta's recent history and one of the worst in Canada's history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonton_Tornado

[TimB09]

For a tornado to remain on the ground for an hour is unheard of really. Those are rare rare cases where they do. Usually they last anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes.

[ExcaliburKid]

I lived in Millwoods, approx. 35th Ave and 50th street. Remember standing in the living room with my mom, I was 3 at the time, and watching the thing go by in the distance. Didnt really understand the urgency of the situation at the time, but went out afterward and collected at least 3 or 4 of the hail stones. Kinda scary to think back because my dad worked near the Esso refinery at the time, which was pretty close to the tornado path. His building was untouched though.

[Mycroft]

I remember driving with my dad to go get some KFC or something for dinner...as soon as we pulled in to the drive-thru, we saw this enormous black mass of clouds reaching towards the ground. My dad jammed the car into reverse and we booked it home and had soup instead...I was pretty little, but I remember knowing that there were tornado warnings and being pretty freaked out.

[Greco Roman]

I was living in Winnipeg when this happened.

However, I do recall travelling with several other family members out to Alberta that year. It was a few weeks after the tornado had occured. After visiting my uncle in Calgary, we were driving up to Edmonton. I remember that everytime I saw a dark cloud, I would think a tornado was coming; the same one that just struck Edmonton. Keep in mind I was only 7

I also remember that when we visited WEM during this trip, the rollercoaster was not in operation due to that man falling out of his seat and ultimately dying. I wanted to go on that thing so bad, but had to settle for the submarine instead.

That was one hell of a trip, and one hell of a year for Edmonton.

[Coldrsx]

Originally Posted by feepa

http://www.ee.ualberta.ca/~rob/tornado87.htm

many of these pictures were from my dad's office if i recall.

[towerguy3]

Are you talking about the rollercoaster at Galaxyland? So there has been one death on that coaster?

[Jasper and one o nin]

I was in refinery row 19 street between sh park frwy and baseline rd. 3 ppl were killed in the building across the street from where I was. The building i was in had the roof partially fall in and partially blown away. The tornado passed directly overhead. When I went outside, it was almost as if i was in a completely different place that I was 10 minutes before. Building material was everywhere, cars moved around and the steel building across the street was in a pile of twisted metal.

[lubicon]

I was working in the Red Earth area the day it happened and remember hearing about it on the radio. I recall the day being very hot and humid and we got some pretty good thunderstorms in our area later in the afternoon. The first time I saw the path the storm took in person I was floored by the amount of damage. I remember an old farmyard just east of Millwoods on 23rd Ave. The trees were all sheared off like someone took a chainsaw to them about 20-30 feet off the ground. It was still that way when I leved in Edmonton in 1997. Not sure if the area has been developed now or if that old yard is still there.

[newfangled]

Originally Posted by towerguy3

Are you talking about the rollercoaster at Galaxyland? So there has been one death on that coaster?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindben...axyland)#Crash

On the evening of June 14th, 1986, some time after completing the second inverted loop, loose bolts on the wheel assemblies caused the wheels on the final car of the four-car yellow train to become disengaged during a regular run with a full load of riders. This caused the final car to bounce wildly, throwing off passengers and losing speed. The train entered the third and final inverted loop, but did not have the speed to complete the loop. The train stalled at the top, then slid backwards, crashing into a concrete pillar. Three people were killed during the accident and a fourth man was paralyzed.

[Boris2k7]

I was still in my mother's womb somewhere in suburban Edmonton. Be glad that the tornado never came my way, for you might not have been able to behold my magnificence.