‘Trees around us were toppling over’: clean up on in Red Deer

RED DEER, AB (NEWS 1130) – Red Deer declared a local state of emergency after a violent storm pushed trees onto power lines, causing widespread outages Tuesday night.

Officials said restoring electricity remains a priority after the central Alberta community was battered by winds of more than 100 kilometres an hour.

“We’re still working to get power restored to the remaining five per cent of our customers,” explained City of Red Deer Emergency Operations Coordinator Karen Mann. “Yesterday, about 30 per cent of our customers were at one point without power. [We’re] making a lot of progress, but there’s a ways to go for some of those hardest impacted.”

Environment Canada said the powerful storm was not a tornado.

One person suffered minor injuries during the storm but was quickly released from hospital.

“We were lucky, based on the nature of the event that there was the only one confirmed injury and we didn’t see anything more serious,” said Mann.

At this point, it’s unclear how many trees came down during the storm.

“Our crews are working diligently hour after hour to assess the number of trees that are currently down and the impacts to our parks, green spaces,” said Mann. “We were able to get to work quickly to address the needs and restore power and dealing with downed trees.”

Sheldon Spackman is with the online news and community page Todayville and was out at a soccer game with his son when the sky turned black and the wind whipped up Tuesday night.

“And next thing you knew, trees around us were toppling over, they were bending over, they were snapping right out of the ground,” described Spackman. “There were trees landing on vehicles parked along the side of the road. There were shingles flying off houses. One nearby house had part of its roof torn off and the kids and coaches were doing what they could to take shelter.”