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Photo by Edward Parsons / Postmedia files

140

Injuries mounted quickly, with 140 people requiring various levels of medical attention. As then-prime minister Jean Chretien said when he toured the site on July 18: “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.”

Photo by Chris Schwarz / Edmonton Journal

12

Twelve people lost their lives as a result. The Calgary victims were: Merrill Booth, 63; Charles Boutin, 72; Lisa Gourley, 30; Thomas Ian Prior, 68; Margaret Provan, 66; and Kenneth Prudhomme, 50. The other victims were: Irving Simmonds, 74, from Edmonton; Clifford Stegman, 50, from Red Deer; Margot Warner, 31, from Rumsey; Oren Wangsness, 51, from Leduc; Doris Broberg, 63, from Strathmore; and Lucas Holtom, two, from Ontario.

Photo by Edward Parsons / SEE BYLINE!

2nd

Rated as the second-most deadly tornado in Alberta’s history behind the Edmonton-area twister that killed 27 people July 31, 1987. Known as Black Friday, that event injured 600 and left 1,700 homeless. Canada’s most lethal tornado killed 28 in Regina in 1912. The Canadian Disaster Database says the most deadly natural disaster in Alberta dates to April 29, 1903, when 70 people were killed in a landslide in the small mining town of Frank in southwest Alberta. An estimated 60 million tonnes of limestone buried part of the town. Twenty-three people were injured.

Aerial photo of the Pine Lake campground.

300 km/h

Wind speeds were estimated to have peaked at about 300 km/h, but what made this event more deadly was that the tornado ranged between 800 metres and 1-1/2 km wide. Using the Fujita scale — a rank of a tornado’s intensity which provides an estimate of its wind speed based on the observed damage — the Pine Lake event was rated an F-3 event. The most devastating level on the scale is F-5, with wind speeds topping 500 km/h.

Photo by Chris Schwarz / Edmonton Journal

$3.4M

When insurance adjusters were done, the damage caused to the Pine Lake area was estimated at $3.4 million. In comparison, the Edmonton-area twister did an estimated $330 million in damage. Since 2000, natural disasters, including floods, fires and storms, have caused an estimated $4.6 billion in damage in Alberta.

Photo by Keith Morison / Calgary Herald

100

The cleanup efforts included 100 soldiers who assisted in recovery operations. Twenty search and rescue teams were deployed, the Calgary Fire Department supplied dive teams and six navy divers also assisted in recovery operations.