Juliett Bravo Kilo
Member
I can't find anything about this on wikipedia....Canada has a lot of unrated tornadoes due to being poorly documented and occurring way out in the boonies, I did find mention of a tornado in Quebec in 1975 but nothing in '73 or '74. Weird....Yeah, you're right. I checked Landsat this morning and the track(s) looked fairly old even as far back as 1982. So, I ended up going down the rabbit hole and now I wish Josh had never made that post lol. I'm still poking around, but here's what I found so far. It's hard to say for certain, but it appears the super-long Sainte-Anne-du-Lac track is at least three tornadoes.
The first is indicated by the green arrow, but I'll circle back to that in a minute. The second looks like it starts just a little west of the Gens de Terre River (blue arrow) and lifts south of the Mitchinamecus Reservoir (red arrow), after which the third tornado starts and continues to just beyond the eastern shore of Kempt Lake (forgot to mark that one, but it's in the upper right corner). That'd make the second tornado ~53 miles and the third ~44 miles.
Here's a closer view of the (likely?) break between the second and third paths.
Getting back to the first tornado (green arrow in the first image), here's a wider view of that area with the same section of track again marked by a green arrow. The purple arrow is presumably from the same family as well but it's a bit hard to make out specific details re: where the paths start/end. The yellow arrow is another subtle little area that may or may not be a path (I'm inclined to say no).
Anywho, the very first image is from 3/23/73. The second is 2/24/73, which is as far back as I was able to identify the tracks. The last usable images before that, which I think were like June or July of '72, didn't show any as far as I could see. Altogether, that's at least 140 miles of (broken) tornado tracks, maybe somewhat longer.
Now, the track denoted by the yellowish arrows on Josh's map (which looks to have passed directly over Lizotte) is clearly visible in this image from 2/8/74, but doesn't seem to appear on earlier imagery (though it's hard to tell for certain because they're quite cloudy). This is a distance of right around 65 miles, so very roughly in the same neighborhood as Grand Valley.
I haven't had time to look any further yet, but man.. consider me intrigued.