Impact of Black Friday still felt 30 years later

Black Friday through the eyes of survivors Thirty years ago on this day, Edmonton was forever changed when a massive tornado tore through the city.

On July 31, 1987, a massive tornado cut a 45 kilometre path of destruction through east Edmonton – it left 27 dead, and hundreds injured, many still living with the scars caused on a day now known as Black Friday.

“Every year when it comes, July 31, you think about it,” District Fire Chief Brian Lees said.

At the time, Lees had been on the job for only a few years, and remembers clearly what happened that day.

“Being on for seven years and that happening so quick, so fast and so many calls and so many people needing help was the devastating part, because you would like to stop and help everybody, but we had to prioritize,” Lees said.

One of the areas hardest hit by the tornado was Evergreen Mobile Home Park in northeast Edmonton – fifteen people died there.

“When I saw the trailers I was like ‘Wow, this is much worse than I had anticipated’, I’d never seen destruction like that, it was like a bomb had gone off,” Detective Bill Clark said.

Clark went back to Evergreen with CTV News; he said entire rows of homes were destroyed.

“There were just pieces of two by fours, broken,” Clark said. “I mean, cars were overturned. You couldn’t see the road for the litter.”

Lees and Clark arrived not long after the tornado hit, and had a major role in saving the lives of two people – by rushing them both to hospital.

One of those people was an infant at the time.

“One of the ladies who lived there started yelling ‘my baby, my baby!’” Lees said. “So my partner and I went over to her and said: ‘where did you live?’ She said somewhere here, well somewhere here, there was nothing left of it.”

Lees and his partner quickly focused on finding the child.

“We heard a couple of baby cries, we started throwing debris left and right, that’s when I found the baby, probably under about four feet of debris,” Lees said. “It wasn’t alive at that time, so I cleaned its mouth out and doing CPR and started running.”

Lees passed the infant on to a nurse, who found Clark.

“She hands me this baby, it’s 10 days old, born at the Charles Camsel,” Clark said.

“I’m looking and I’m thinking this baby is so small, I had a son, he was three months old at the time.”

Clark moved quickly to get the infant to a hospital.

“So I just got in the police car, put the baby on my lap.”

Clark took the baby, and another woman impacted by the tornado, Lynn Rosychuk, to hospital.

Rosychuk had been inside her mother’s trailer when the tornado hit Evergreen.

“All of a sudden the wind just started blowing, and raining, we noticed the patio furniture flew off the deck,” Rosychuk said in a phone interview with CTV News.

“We both walked up to the window and the last thing I remember is we were getting thrown around.”

Rosychuk and her mother Merle Shirley Bain were thrown from the trailer.

“I woke up outside, about 50 feet from the trailer, and mom was beside me,” Rosychuk said, she told CTV News she tried to find a pulse, but couldn’t.

Rosychuk had a dislocated shoulder and hip, but managed to find help quickly.

She learned later that her mother had been taken to a make-shift morgue at the trailer park – it took more than a day for Rosychuk to be told her mother had died.

Rosychuk told CTV News she believed God was with her that day, after she lived through Black Friday, she came through the Ontario ice storms in 1998, and she’s beat cancer four times.

“My friends would tell you that I’m very strong,” Rosychuk said.

Clark managed to get Rosychuk and the infant to the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

“I’ll never forget that ride, he drove from the Evergreen Trailer Park to the Royal Alex, the traffic and the debris, and everything else,” Rosychuk said. “He got us there, I don’t know how he did.”

“The baby wasn’t making a noise, wasn’t bleeding,” Clark said. “I didn’t know if it had broken bones, and so I thought, these people need to get to hospital, there’s no sense waiting for ambulances.”

The infant survived, Clark visited her again shortly after the tornado, and reunited with her again around the 20^th anniversary of the tornado.

“I never figured myself too emotional of a guy, but it definitely does hit you,” Clark said.

Thirty years have passed since Black Friday, but the memories are still crystal clear for those most affected by the tornado.

“When it does get dark and the wind picks up, I’m downstairs,” Rosychuk said.

“It hurt every one of us, it affected us, it can’t not,” Lees said.

“Every time I see storms rolling in, the first thing I think about is a tornado, is a tornado rolling in?” Clark said.

With files from Erin Isfeld and Jonathan Glasgow