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Violent tornados are hurtling toward Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer in the middle of a summer heat wave, striking homes and destroying everything in their paths.

That’s the fictional scenario emergency response teams in Alberta are preparing for this week. The annual exercise, running Wednesday through Friday, simulates a realistic emergency scenario and tests how provincial agencies respond. Alberta was hit with 23 tornadoes in 2019, while only four were recorded in 2018.

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“The average, normally in Alberta, is 15. Last year, there was an uptick,” Scott Long, the executive director of provincial operations at the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, said on Wednesday at the Provincial Operations Centre in Edmonton.

There were 112 hail storms last year — more than double the number in 2018 — and the province set a record for the number of lightning strikes, around 602,000 strikes.

“Previous years we’ve done wildfires, we’ve done floods, we’ve done ice storms. When we do these scenarios, we choose challenging, complex threats and potential threats, and clearly tornadoes in Alberta is a potential threat.”