EDMONTON TORNADO 1987

JULY 31st, 1987, LEDUC, ALBERTA, CANADA

MY SIGHTING AND EARLY WARNING | tom taylor

It was 2:51 P.M., July 31st, 1987, when a transparent tornado decloaked as a ghostly hologram on the landscape. This is how it unfolded.

I had just spent the morning training my English labrador retrievers for a field trial occurring the following day at Tofield, Alberta. At noon I fed and water the dogs prior to preparing for my evening work shift.

As I walked back to the house, unusually large raindrops began falling from the fast moving scattered clouds overhead. The sweltering weather of the past several days was about to end as forecast.

Inside the house, I could hear the rain fall increase in intensity. Occasional hail rang off the roof and vents. Angry peals of thunder started so I hastily got out of the bath. The rain turned torrential and the backyard became foggy.

Suddenly the torrential rain stopped as if driving under an overpass. I looked out of the bedroom window.

There in the south west I immediately noticed a small wasp shaped cloud hanging beneath the base of the cloud deck. Little did I realize that this was a wall cloud that had just started to form. I stared at it in case a funnel developed.

Suddenly a thin translucent funnel flashed onto the landscape. I could see through it. material was radiateing out from the funnel and upward at a 45 degree angle, in a brownian-lke movement, and disappeared into the cloud base. The funnel connected the cloud base to the ground below. This was a tornado. It had touched down inside the eastern edge of Leduc, Alberta.

Then it was gone, just as suddenly. It had lasted only ten seconds.

I went upstairs into the loft and glanced around. Rain was pouring down all around, but not in my location. I was in the center of something.

I decided that the Weather Office in Edmonton needed to know what I had seen, so I dialed the public number for requesting weather information from a meteorologist in the Edmonton Weather Office.

Being uncertain if I had seen what I had seen, I asked the meteorologist if there was a tornado in the area of the Edmonton International Airport. I was asked if I had seen a funnel.

After a rapid exchange, the Weather Office ended our conversation so that they could issue a tornado warning.

I returned to the loft upstairs. By this time the lowered cloud was North East of the house. As the cloud travelled toward Beaumont, Alberta, the belly slumped, spitting out a huge funnel which slammed onto the ground below. I watched as the tornado churned along, exploding buildings it encountered. The tornado eventually turned northward where it raked the eastern edge of Edmonton, Alberta, causing deather and destruction. And as they say, the rest is history.

I was later given an award in recognition of my timely warning of the F4 Edmonton Tornado, which became the second deadliest tornado in Canadian history, with the death of 27 persons.

25th ANNIVERSARY REFLECTIONS

In hindsight, the tornado had only appeared because of the lake water or clay filled pools of water which it had picked up. This caused the sudden flashing of the image on the landscape. Normally a tornado appears to descend from the cloud base as the funnel pulls the cloud down to the surface. This is the result of evaporative cooling of highly moist air drawn into the strengthening updraft. The tornado is actually the invisible circulating column of air, not the visible cloud surrounding the air column.

The small wasp nest hanging from the cloud base was the wall cloud in the infancy of it's formation as it headed directly toward me. Once in a lifetime event.

Thomas O. Taylor