F-5 Tornado in Canada

via videosift.com

From Videosift:

This is a beautiful twister in Elie, Manitoba. The town of approximately 550 people is located about 40 km (25 miles) west of Winnipeg.

From Comments on Videosift:

-I remember that storm; we live in Winnipeg. They just revised the damage estimates from it to $4million (astonishing for how small of a populated area it affected), and declared it the very first confirmed F5 tornado in Canada.

It's also because of this storm that they're finally getting moving on an emergency notification system for severe weather. I grew up in Tornado Alley, so finding out that Winnipeg has no tornado sirens is a bit of a psychological blow for me.

Also, it looks (and sounds!) like the people who took the video are members of the Hutterite colony right by Elie, which is why it sounds like they're speaking German - they are! (Low/Old German, anyway).

-at 6:25 you can see it pick up an entire building and disintegrate it.

-Fujita scale ≠ wind speed. It is based on damage assessments.

From the Fujita Scale wiki entry:

The Fujita scale (F-Scale), or Fujita-Pearson scale, is a scale for rating tornado intensity, based on the damage tornadoes inflict on human-built structures and vegetation. The official Fujita scale category is determined by meteorologists (and engineers) after a ground and/or aerial damage survey ...
Though each damage level is associated with a wind speed, the Fujita scale is a damage scale, and the wind speeds associated with the damage listed are unverified.