Violent storm damages Edmonton's CN Tower
EDMONTON — Trees and power lines fell across the city Saturday night, felled by violent winds that were at one point strong enough to rip the bottom out of the floor of one downtown building, crushing several vehicles.
Around 10 o’clock, the severe weather tore down the awning of the CN Tower at 104th Avenue and 100th Street. The building has a second floor wider than its base, and the material that made up the overhang came crashing down on an SUV and a truck.
“On the first call it sounded like there were people in the cars, but they turned out to be empty,” said fire platoon chief Ron Norman.
No one was hurt and the building was evacuated. Onlookers braved pouring rain and, at times, hail, to gawk at the debris that littered the ground. The falling material dragged most of the “CN Tower” sign above the main doors down, leaving only the N, T, O and the W hanging by a wire.
Glass from the crash flew across 104th Avenue and scattered around the street.
Brian Danyluk was driving down the street just as the crash happened.
“The winds were just howling,” said Danyluk, who took pictures of the wreckage.
Gary Kuhn was at a concert in Winston Churchill Square when the winds kicked up.
“There were all kinds of things flying through the air; I guess it could have been debris from this,” he said, pointing at the mess.
Environment Canada meteorologist Blair Morrow said a gust front sent winds howling through the city at speeds up to 110 km/h.
“The thunderstorms produced the winds, so it was straight line winds just plowing through everything,” he said.
Saturday night, Environment Canada had no confirmed reports of tornadoes, and Morrow said that by midnight, the worst of it was over.
Still, the force of the storm kept the city’s emergency services hopping.
“We have just about every station out right now. At one point, dispatch told me they had 40 calls lined up. A lot of these are just people getting scared, a lot of trees come down, a lot of power lines down,” Norman said.
Epcor spokesman Tim LeRiche said the winds took out power poles and power lines all over the city, and said the situation sparked several fires. He said he couldn’t estimate the number of houses and businesses affected by outages, only that the storm’s impact was enormous.
“There are wires down all over the city,” he said late Saturday night. “We’ve got outages all over the city. We’ve called out extra crews, we’ve got as many guys out on the street as we can to deal with this.”
Ensuring public safety was paramount as crews were assigned to deal with the cleanup, which was expected to carry on into Sunday.
On Whyte Avenue, power outages saw bars and restaurants booting out their customers and locking their doors, according to one restaurant owner.
“The streets were full of people,” said Howie Silverman, co-owner of Dadeo Restaurant.
At his establishment, diners were told that if they were already eating, the meal was on the house, and if they didn’t have food yet “they weren’t getting any.” Then the restaurant, like every other business along the avenue, shut down for the night.
“Now the streets are empty. The entire avenue is black,” he said, about two hours after the power went out at 10 p.m.
“It’s creepy.”
Silverman said police were directing traffic, and keeping things calm. His concern was now for the food in his freezers and refrigerators, as he waited for the power to be turned back on.
For those inside, the storm was the talk of the Internet, with so many users on the microblogging site Twitter talking about it that the symbol used to denote Edmonton — #yeg — became one of the site’s top 10 “Trending Topics.”
Edmonton Journal
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