Drumheller and the surrounding area were hit by a destructive hailstorm Saturday, July 19.
Developing in the Rocky Mountains, and heading Eastward throughout the evening, the summer storm that blew through Drumheller brought alarming amounts of damage to the area due to a large volume of hail, intermingled with rain and high wind speeds.
Bill McMurtry is a meteorologist with Environment Canada and oversees Alberta’s weather patterns for the summer months.
“It’s fairly typical, what we’re seeing this time of year. We’re right in the summer’s severe weather season right now,” explains McMurtry.
Around eight-thirty p.m., as the storm began to approach, Drumheller’s temperature dropped from 22 degrees to 13 degrees within half an hour. Wind speeds began to peak to almost 90 km/h while chunks of varying size hail began to mix into the oncoming downpour.
The storm hit Drumheller full throttle and left everything in its path in disarray. Dinosaur Golf and Country Club seemed to be caught in the middle of the destruction.
Within a twenty minute time frame, there were five full grown trees uprooted due to strong wind gusts and large branches were whipped around the golf course’s front nine. Hail damage on the greens and the clubhouse were discovered after the storm’s passing. The golf course has lost two days worth of revenue in order to clean up the mess and hoped to reopen Tuesday, July 22.
As some Drumheller businesses struggled to open Monday morning, farmers in the area faced a more permanent loss of their own. Cropland ended up seeing the brute end of the storm, as some farmers ended up losing almost 100% of their yield to hail damage.
Joe Rowbottom has been farming in the Drumheller area for twenty years and has experience handling situations like weather damage.
“I’d say that a third of our acres are a 100 per cent write off. But it was getting to the point that we needed rain fairly badly, and we got moisture, maybe not the preferred form, but we did get it, and now we get some relief for the cow feed, since we’re going to try and bail a bunch of it,” says Rowbottom. “It’s still disappointing because we had a really nice crop coming and we put a lot of effort into it to get it that way. I mean, your goal as a farmer is to harvest the crop, not collect hail insurance.”
The storm that ripped through the area seemed to have limitless destruction. Alan Kendrick, director of infrastructure for the town, oversaw the aftermath of the storm’s blows.
“I don’t think we have a complete list of all the damage, but from what I’ve seen it’s been mostly trees,” explains Kendrick, “my understanding is that many residents have experienced cracked siding, shingle damage, and broken windows.”
