Amanda Gallant got a bit of a shock Monday when she went outside to see a funnel cloud dropping out of the sky.
“It was there and scary,” she said.
Gallant is a sales associate at Brown’s Volkswagen where staff were buzzing about the unusual weather phenomenon that hung over the capital for about 30 minutes Monday around 1 p.m.
Funnel clouds can form when cold air nears warm water, such as is found in the Northumberland Strait.
They are part of a spectrum that ranges from tornadoes at the high end to something much less powerful, such as a dust devil on the low end.
A thin column of what looked like a small tornado could be seen reaching down and away from a dark mass of clouds over Charlottetown Monday, slowly growing as its tip hung above the ground.
Fear of the unusual cloud didn’t keep the dealership’s staff from snapping a few pictures of what they saw, although Gallant said she didn’t know how far the cloud was from the dealership when she saw it.
“A little ways away but a little close for comfort,” she said.
Gallant said she joked at the time that she was going to go home and hide in her bathtub and added she had never seen anything like the funnel cloud before.
“Not in my life.”
Environment Canada issued a special weather statement Monday afternoon that said funnel clouds aren’t dangerous, but also advised people to monitor future forecasts in case warnings were necessary.
Linda Libby is a meteorologist with the weather agency and said if funnel clouds like the one in Charlottetown get close to the ground usually only affect something that can catch the wind like a sail because they aren't that strong.
“It’s very rare that they touch down,” she said.
What is more common is for them to touch down on the water and Libby said it’s not unusual to see water spouts on the Northumberland Strait.
“Seeing them over Charlottetown, that’s a little out of the ordinary.”
Libby said there hasn’t been one over the city in at least the last four years.
Someone sent her a picture of Monday’s funnel and Libby said she was surprised by how well defined it was because she expected the cloud to be more wispy and loose.
“This was a pretty tight looking funnel there.”
That made no sense whatsoever John Mc.