A simulated tornado ripped through northeast St. Albert on April 25, and more than 80 city staff members spent the day hunkered down at the city's Incident Command Post inside Fire Hall No. 1 as they worked through what responding to such an event would involve.
If an actual tornado was to hit St. Albert proper, something that's never happened in recorded history, the first thing that happens when it comes to a municipal response is that first responders attend the scene, explained the city's emergency management manager Mark Pickford during a break in the exercise.
“First responders go to scene, they do their assessments and go ‘this isn't a structure fire or loose dog, this is like massive,’” Pickford said. “Firefighters, police, [and] EMS, they realize that, then it goes up to their senior commanders — their platoon captains or deputy chief or fire chief — and then fire dispatch will call myself... and say ‘this is going on, what do we do?”
“[We] activate,” he said, referring to the city's emergency response plan, which consists of four distinct levels of activation that are separated by expected response times and the extent of the emergency at hand. There's also a “pre-level” response that involves a handful of staff members monitoring a situation, such as game night of an Edmonton Oilers playoff run, that could potentially require an emergency response.
Another example of the level system Pickford pointed to was the partial train derailment just east of St. Albert in early March, for which the city activated a Level 1 response — the lowest level of response. This level of response, which is used for events that are handled within six hours, involves a handful of staff members from different city departments working from the Incident Command Post and communicating with first responders on scene in case evacuation notices need to be issued, or various supplies need to be sourced quickly.
A Level 2 emergency response would be for an event that is over within 8-12 hours, Pickford said, while a Level 3 response is for events that are longer than day and a Level 4 response is for an indeterminate amount of time with the disaster being the only thing staff are working on.
For the sake of the April 25 exercise, city staff were operating under a Level 4 paradigm and over 3,000 homes were affected.
After Pickford receives a call from fire dispatch, he calls the city's chief administrative officer Bill Fletcher, who in turn calls the mayor to get verbal approval for the city to declare a state of local emergency (SOLE).
A SOLE declaration then allows the city to access provincial resources through the Alberta Emergency Management Agency and the field officers that are assigned to each and every municipality in Alberta.
Although not dependent on having a SOLE declared, Pickford explained that during this time applicable city staff members are convening at the Incident Command Post, and getting to work on resourcing everything that's needed to respond to the aftermath of a tornado, such as setting up an evacuation point or temporary shelter at Servus Place like the city did last summer for evacuees of wildfires in the Northwest Territories, or resourcing enough food to temporarily help those that have been displaced by the tornado.
Pickford said this year's training exercise was designed to build-off of the work done last year when the city completed a similar training.
“There is a lot more going on in the emergency management world, especially over at least the last five years,” he said. “Municipalities are becoming more professionalized [in emergency management] and making it almost like a line of service.”
“We have fire services and police, well, emergency management is becoming that as well where it's a service to our public.”
A tornado in St. Albert?
As many long-time residents would attest, a tornado has never hit St. Albert in recent history, although, according to an Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) database, that's not exactly true.
The day before the infamous Black Friday Tornado that struck east Edmonton and killed 27 people on July 31, 1987, records show that an F1 tornado touched down in the rural area southeast of St. Albert by what is now called Albany Market Square at the intersection of 127 Street and 167 Avenue. Although the tornado didn't touch down within St. Albert's limits, its proximity to St. Albert means that it was recorded as occurring in St. Albert.
Alysa Pederson, a warning preparedness meteorologist with ECCC, said in an email that the tornado touched down at about 5:45 p.m.
“It obtained its rating due to damage that occurred to a shed and a greenhouse,” Pederson said. “For tornadoes like this, it is common for there to be minimal record of the damage.”
“It is common for us to hear about brief events like this where the public may not pick up on it.”
From what the Gazette could find, the public didn't pick up on this pre-Black Friday tornado.
In fact, Vino Vipulanantharajah, the archivist at St. Albert's Musée Héritage Museum, said in email that the only reference to tornadoes he was able to find after a search through the archives was a clipping from a year-in-review article the Gazette published in December of 1987 that briefly mentions how St. Albertans spent the weekend after Black Friday collecting and sorting donations at the Perron Street Arena, also known as the Ducky Dome, for those affected and displaced.
Cheryl Stuart remembers that weekend all too well.
“I worked for the MLA at that time Bryan Strong, who had just been elected, and I was his constituency manager, so I was in the office on Perron Street,” she said. “We always had a radio going in the background and I'm hearing reports about what was going on in Edmonton and I go out and look outside and see what our sky looked like and it looked fine, but as the afternoon wore on it was getting darker and you could tell it was going to be a storm and I decided to leave the office a little bit early.”
At home with her children and stepchildren, Stuart was back listening to the radio intently before the storm got louder and louder near her house in Larose.
“Stupidly, I guess now, I remember going out on the front porch and taking a couple of pictures,” she said. “It wasn't until the next day when we heard and saw pictures of what the tornado had actually done in the east end of Edmonton.”
On Saturday morning, Stuart said she got an unexplainable feeling that she needed to go to the Ducky Dome, so she did.
“I drove down there, and within a couple of minutes another woman pulled up and she had the same response as I did: ‘I don't know why I came here but I had to,” she explained. “We decided between the two of us that we were going to set up a place for donations to be taken because they were asking for that on the radio.”
To get the ball rolling, Stuart said she drove back home to call then-Mayor Richard Fowler to ask him to open the rink.
“I phoned him and I said this is what's happening, and he said ‘it'll be open in five minutes,” Stuart said. “I grabbed my coffee pot, some mugs and coffee and what have you and went back down and by that time [the rink was open and] we went in and we didn't know really what we were doing, but suddenly other people started arriving and we set tables up and we got organized.”
As the day wore on, Stuart estimated there was at one point 50-60 people at the Ducky Dome sorting donations. That level of people-power ended up being put to the test later that evening when, Stuart said, somebody got a call from the City of Edmonton asking if the St. Albert crew could help sort donations.
“We said 'yup', and they brought garbage trucks full of donations, and we dumped them in the middle of the arena.”
“We worked that whole weekend. Hours and hours and hours and I don't remember feeling tired,” she said. “It was, I hate to say, fun, because it doesn't sound right when you're talking about a horrible event.”
“It was a very comforting and kind weekend that I realized what a great community that we lived in.”
It could happen again
Dr. David Sills, the executive director of Western University's Northern Tornado Project (NTP) research team, said it's essentially a game of chance that tornadoes don't strike Canadian cities more frequently.
“Really it is just the fact that comparatively speaking the spaces that cities take up is a lot smaller than the rural areas in Canada,” he said. “That EF4 tornado last year in southern Alberta, it was just pure luck that didn't form a bit further south into more urbanized areas like Didsbury or Carstairs.”
“People have to be aware that these big tornadoes can hit cities, and it's not a question of if, it's a question of when.”
Sills, who holds a PhD in Atmospheric Science, explained that Alberta, especially southern and central Alberta, is a “pretty unique” place when it comes to the weather conditions that cause tornadoes.
“A lot of the storms depend on what's called a dry line that comes off of the [Rocky Mountains],” he said. “It's the line that separates warm dry air that's coming down from the Rockies with cooler, moist air, and a lot of the moisture is from the crops that come in on the prairies.”
“There's this dividing line there that really ends up triggering thunderstorms and actually helps the development of tornadoes as well.”
May 5 to 11 is Emergency Management Week across Canada. To find more information about how to be prepared, such as what to include in an emergency bag in case you need to evacuate your home, visit the city's website.
