Metro Edmonton came in for a rude awakening over the weekend following a severe hailstorm event, with stones reaching the size of grapefruits smashing windshields and damaging properties.
Environment Canada received reports of hail as large as 102 millimetres in Spruce Grove and 70 millimetres in Edmonton on Friday.
After the storm passed, Metro Edmonton resident Kate Dunn found the rear windshield of her car shattered.
“I’ve heard of cars getting dented by hail but I don’t think I know anyone that’s had a window completely smashed,” she told CTV News.
Spruce Grove local Edwin Huber has been living in the area for nearly seven decades, but has never seen hail as big as those that fell last Friday.
“It was coming down pretty hard and quite a bit of wind with it,” he told CBC News after hailstones put multiple cracks in his vehicle’s windshield.
Blaine Lowry, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, explained to CBC News that supercell thunderstorms coming from the north of Drayton Valley were responsible for the size of the hail. He explained that a supercell storm has strong and persistent updrafts that keep the hail suspended in the upper level of the storm, allowing it to grow to grapefruit sizes.
Although the weather event last Friday produced a tornado watch, there were no reports of a twister touching down, CTV News said.
The weather event comes after recent reports that the province of Alberta experiences the worst hailstorms in all of Canada.
AMA Insurance compiled data from across Canada in a report last month, which found that 51% of all storm-related damage in the country since 2010 has occurred in Alberta. The province has also incurred about $5 billion worth of insured damage since the same year. The report also revealed that 66% of Canada’s major hailstorms occur in the province.
Read more: Hailstorm events on the rise in Alberta
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) has confirmed the severity of hailstorms in the country. In a recent statement responding to increases in hailstorm events in Alberta, IBC director of consumer and industry relations Rob de Pruis mentioned that in the last decade, the insurance industry has paid about $1 billion in severe weather damages across the country.
Pruis added that, in 2018 alone, the insurance industry paid in excess of $1.9 billion for severe weather damage claims.
