Alberta tornado had some near misses

An EF-2 tornado touched down a couple kilometres north of Lodgepole last week, leaving a trail of destruction three or four kilometres long.

The Weather Network released a statement on July 4 saying that the July 2 tornado was the fourth to hit Alberta this year, but it was Canada’s first EF-2 tornado in the 2025 season. Wind speeds got up to 190 km/h and the event lasted for about 15 minutes.

Pat Tkaczyk says his wife was in his home when the tornado came into their yard.

“It just barely touched the yard,” says Tkaczyk. “In behind the place is where it started going down more, then across the river and up.”

While there was no damage to his home, he says their car was nearly taken out by some of the debris. He says he wasn’t at the house at the time, but his wife Gale was.

“She was pretty shook up by the time I got there,” he says. 

However, some friends went to the house to check on her and make sure she was all right.

Still cleaning up

While Tkaczyk says he was able to clean up his property soon after it hit, Laina Wentland who lives in the area, was still working on the cleanup last Monday.

“It probably took out a mile-and-a-half or two miles of fence,” says Wentland.

Her home quarter was about one-and-a-half-miles away from the lease land that was damaged, so as her family watched the tornado, they were unaware it was going to cause them problems.

“It was extremely loud,” says Wentland. “If we were more familiar with tornados and it was that loud, we wouldn’t have been standing there. But we don’t know about tornados in this area.”

She says the experience was horrifying. “There’s nothing you can do except stand there and watch it.”

She says her family started on the cleanup an hour after the tornado had hit. The fence line affected is on a pasture that has 32 pairs of cows in it, so they didn’t even stop to figure out if insurance covered it. In fact, they even brought someone in to clear the debris off of the highway because they needed to get to the pasture right away.

There are a few stages of cleanup, says Wentland, but on Monday, she was pretty sure they would be able to get the last of the lines up to keep the cattle in.

“We did have thousands of people come by to look,” she says. “And I mean thousands.”

She says everybody was respectful, including the storm chasers. She says there was only one group of storm chasers that trespassed onto the property and crawled into the debris pile for pictures, which Wentland says was dangerous.

“All of your wood in a debris pile is under pressure,” she says. “Some of them snap off and some of them just twist and bend over… when you cut something or pull something out, it kind of kicks back at you.”

Help from local companies

Wentland says they’ve also received some help from local companies in removing the trees from the highway, and helping with the debris outside of the fence line.

Kara Westerlund was coming home from the Brazeau Dam with two of her children when they saw the tornado.

“My ten-year-old was very upset,” says Westerlund. “My [13-year-old] daughter and I were pretty excited, but still nervous because of the danger. But… we were seeing something that’s just not common in our area, so we knew it was unique.”

Westerlund says the storm blew over them when they were still out at the Brazeau Dam. She says she knew the storm was strange because the temperature didn’t drop and the clouds started getting a greenish colour.

“We had just finished packing everything up when the tornado warning came,” she says.

A few people contacted her, worried about whether the tornado would hit Drayton Valley, but Westerlund says she was more concerned about Lodgepole and Cynthia. 

Once the tornado passed, Westerlund says she and her kids took some time to research tornados so they can be safe if they are ever around another one.

“We’re just incredibly thankful at the end of the day that nobody was hurt, no animals were hurt, and we got to witness something that we don’t get to see every day.”