20th anniversary of the Pine Lake tornado

Within 15 minutes Kelts says the sun was out and people headed back to the ball diamond.

“Then within a half an hour we started hearing ambulances and helicopters. We had an idea that it must have been worse somewhere close to us.”

Soon after, Kelts recalls another ball team made up largely of EMTs and paramedics dropping what they were doing and leaving the diamond.

Kelts and everyone else at the tournament would soon learn that the area just a few kilometres south of where they were, at the Green Acres campground, had been devastated by a powerful tornado.

It claimed the lives of 12 people. 140 were injured and about 1,000 people were left displaced.

“When it passed through it seemed like it was a pretty intense storm, but we had no idea we were on the tail end of a tornado,” he says.

Buses started rolling into the community centre as volunteers were being sought to help at Green Acres. Kelts called family members to let them know he and his wife were okay before boarding a bus and heading to the campground.

He says the destruction he saw upon arrival or arriving at the campground was unimaginable.

(Red Deer Archives VC203)

“It was unbelievable. Thirty-foot motorhomes were on their side and trailers thrown all over the place. I can distinctly remember walking one of the sites and there was a mat there with shoes on it and no trailer. It was hard to believe that it literally picked up the trailer but didn’t move the shoes that were on the mat.”

Kelts remembers the brief moment of panic he felt.

“We were down there earlier that afternoon and some of the team members had kids down there. I remember some young kids playing there and I thought it was odd that there were no parents around. And as we were on the bus I was thinking about those kids. Then I saw some of them sitting on broken-off posts as we were coming into the campground and I just had a huge sigh of relief that they were okay.”

Kelts says that given the amount of devastation the tornado caused it’s fortunate that there weren’t more fatalities.

“That’s one of the hardest things to believe when you’ve actually seen the tornado site.”

The tornado, categorized as an F3 with wind speeds up to 300 km/h and ranging between 800 metres and 1.5 kilometres wide, carved a 15-kilometre path of destruction.

The storm had started developing around 4 p.m. along the Rocky Mountain foothills and at 6:18 p.m., Environment Canada issued a severe thunderstorm warning. It was at 7 p.m. when the twister touched down five kilometres west of Green Acres and smashed its way in a straight line for 15 km, straight through the campground.

It ranks as the second deadliest tornado in Alberta history after the “Black Friday” tornado that claimed 27 lives in Edmonton in 1987.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien visited Green Acres four days after the tornado to see the wreckage first-hand.

Jean Chretien, Canada’s Prime Minister at the time, visited the site of the Pine Lake tornado (Red Deer Archives VC310)

“We were lucky this happened at seven o’clock. If it had come in the middle of the night, it would have been extremely… worse,” Chretien said.

One hundred Canadian soldiers, 20 search and rescue teams, six navy divers, and dive teams from the Calgary Fire Department were all involved in the response and recovery operations.

Those who lost their lives from the tornado were:

Clifford Stegman, 50, from Red Deer
Merrill Booth, 63, Calgary
Charles Boutin, 72, Calgary
Lisa Gourley, 30, Calgary
Thomas Ian Prior, 68, Calgary
Margaret Provan, 66, Calgary
Kenneth Prudhomme, 50, Calgary
Irving Simmonds, 74, Edmonton
Margot Warner, 31, Rumsey
Oren Wangsness, 51, Leduc
Doris Broberg, 63, Strathmore
and Lucas Holtom, two, from Ontario.

(Story written with file from Red Deer Archives, including video from digital archive file VC203, and The Canadian Press)

by Troy Gillard

20th anniversary of the Pine Lake tornado

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