Crews work on a tree snapped and leaning on a house in southwest Medicine Hat following the storm that hit the city and surrounding area Monday afternoon. - NEWS PHOTO JAMES TUBB
cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant
High winds that accompanied a storm first described as a tornado as it passed by Redcliff, snapping power lines and sending hay bales rolling down the highway on Monday afternoon.
Though a house in Cypress County was destroyed, reports of injuries were thankfully few, according to emergency officials.
It was the first tornado to occur in the Medicine Hat near region in decades, however The Canadian Press reported that the Alberta Emergency Alert system later identified it as a storm with dangerous and damaging winds.
It was also the worst single storm in several years, according to city emergency response officials, which caused widespread damage to power lines and trees, and sent Southeastern Albertans into their basements for shelter.
“Everyone is a little bit different, but it’s safe to say that this time there is more damage in the county than in the city,” said Merrick Brown, the city’s director of emergency management.
With about 5,000 customers still without power at 5 p.m. Monday, Brown said crews were working hard to restore power, but residents should expect a “prolonged outage,” and the Alberta Emergency Alert system warned of the same.
“We are warning everyone to please stay away from downed power lines, because at this point we don’t know what’s live (energized).”
Brown’s office was still waiting on a confirmation of a report that a second twister had touched down in Echo dale Regional Park, where a 2017 “plow wind event” pushed over dozens of trees and a replanting program was underway this year.
Redcliff streets were littered with broken branches, and a News photographer witnessed large round hay bales lining both side of the highway as he travelled to the reported site of the touchdown.
At 1:32 p.m. Alberta Emergency alert stated, the funnel cloud touched down in the area of Highway 523 and the Trans-Canada, west of Redcliff.
Cypress County closed that section of road to all motorists, including nearby residents, due to storm damage later in the afternoon. Social media showed one badly damaged farmyard in the areas, though the person posted soon after that no one was seriously injured.
The City of Medicine Hat opened its emergency operations centre mid-afternoon to provide mutual assistance to Cypress County and Redcliff, where officials worked to maintain water and sewer service despite the blanket power outage.
The centre will also coordinate cleanup and work with city power distribution to get lines reconnected to some 5,000 customers that remained offline in the early evening.
Problems were reported throughout Redcliff, the city’s western and northern areas, and downed lines blocked access to plant sites on Box Springs Road.
Officials with Hut 8 Cryptocurrency said power to their dataprocessing centre on Northern Box Springs Road was out, but the site itself incurred little physical damage.
CHAT Television was unable to produce an evening newscast for broadcast after the outlet’s building lost power when the powerful winds swept in.
The sweeping thunderstorm that dumped heavy rain and reportedly major hail to the area at about 1:30 p.m.
Environment Canada reported that the local temperature dropped from 26C to 13C over the course of the hour as wind rose from near calm to more, leading to near waves of rain in the west end of the city to vertical rain on the east side.
The huge storm system from Montana at one point stretched from Climax, Sask. to Hanna, Alta. and spent most of the afternoon over eastern Alberta.
The super cell formed near Taber at about noon, where extremely heavy rain was recorded, then headed northeast to travel past Redcliff to the west, then was in Schuler in northern Cypress County by 3 p.m.
A thunderstorm warning had been in place for the region from Environment Canada for the day, which featured lower temperatures than a scorching weekend, but unsettled weather.
It was ended in the afternoon, then reinstated as more wind was expected overnight.
The city’s parks department closed outdoor swimming pools and Echo Dale until an assessment could be completed on Wednesday.
Initially about 7,400 addresses in the city’s north and west ends, along with Redcliff, were without power.
Fortis Alberta reported it had about 400 farm and acreage customers known offline in the area between Highway 3 west of the city, north to CFB Suffield boundary. Another smaller cluster of outages was centred near Chappice Lake, about a half-hour northeast of the Hat.
