Mark Knoefel woke up at 1:40 a.m. Friday to repeated lightning flashes, the roaring wind and a crashing sound as his children’s new playground equipment blew into the air and then dropped onto a fence.
Knoefel, who lives in Sturgeon County just off Starkey Road, didn’t dare step outside, but he looked and saw the massive wooden structure smash into the aluminium fence.
“It flipped several times and then dropped about 50 yards away but the funny thing is the kids’ inflatable pool and a rubber ball they left on the ground never moved,” Knoefel said.
He speculated the storm could have been a tornado, but Environment Canada meteorologist Dan Kulak said that is unlikely.
“The storm was likely in front of a cold front that was roaring in and a line of storms that went with it,” he said, adding that neither the Namao or Edmonton Municipal Airport weather stations showed unusual wind patterns. He also heard the storm in his own Edmonton home.
“There was a strong thunderstorm and with that came winds. When you have thunderstorm updrafts and downdrafts, the downdrafts hit the ground and spread out horizontally. Often those winds are mistaken for tornadoes,” he said.
Downdraft winds have been measured as high as 200 km/h but are more often measured between 60 and 90 km/h.
“They can be sudden and severe, like what happened in Camrose in 2009. People were killed and there was huge damage but it wasn’t a tornado,” Kulak said.
As for the oddity of the plastic ball that’s still in place, Kulak puts that down under “weird weather phenomenon.”
“Weird things happen. For example in the Pine Lake tornado in 2000, four cabins on the lake were blown over, people were killed but on one table, in the same house where people died, there was a stack of dishes still on the table untouched,” he said.
