Storm Damage

I used to really love big summer storms. The raw power is awesome to watch. However, whenever a storm comes through now, I likely know someone who’s crops are getting damaged and they are losing income for their family. Over the weekend we had a number of severe storms come through that damaged crops.

About this time of year the heads of the grain crops are getting heavy with seed. A good rain makes them heavier and some wind can easily push it down. It isn’t unusual to see a few patches in most fields where small areas have been flattened. Sometimes, it will come back up as it dries, but often it just means more work for the farmer to harvest that area of the field. Occasionally a whole field will get hit hard, such as this one.

This is the result of a heavy rain and wind storm that came through. The stalks are intact and the farmer can likely still get this crop off.

Usually a storm rolls through as an isolated storm cell a few kilometers wide with a relatively thin trail of damage, if any. It may even drop some hail, but that is often just small areas, maybe a few hundreds of meters wide, and only damage just part of a field. Not so with the storm we had early Monday morning.

I had been following the storm for several hours that night and had decided it would be best for me to stay up and be ready in case the worst happened. You don’t want to be woken up unprepared by this kind of thing. Environment Canada had some dire warnings:

At 12:20 A.M. MDT radar shows a pair of strong thunderstorms – one cell 55 km southwest of Rocky Mountain House and a second cell 35 km south of Rocky Mountain House. These cells are both moving southwards at 40 km/h. These storms produced baseball sized hail earlier this evening. These storms are also capable of giving gusty winds and heavy downpours.
This is a warning that severe thunderstorms are imminent or occurring in these regions. Remember that some severe thunderstorms produce tornadoes. Listen for updated warnings.

I was tracking the storm on the weather radar, and had never seen a storm that registered red and purple on the rainfall scale. This was going to be bad.

It turned out not too severe at our house and the heaviest rain went to the south. Still, the storm was very impressive. Strong winds and rain came down with nearly constant lightning all around. It was like a having a giant strobe light going outside. Later in the morning we started hearing stories from friends about sheets of rain, strong wind and, further south, hail. Some friends showed photos online of total crop failure, damaged houses and trees, and hail still piled up next to their houses hours after the storm. We decided to take a drive the next day to see for ourselves.

Like I said, normally hail damages narrow swaths of fields, occasionally a whole field gets hit.. What we found was field after field of flattened crop. Many of them looked like they had been mowed down.. which they had by the wind-driven hail. It is hard to take a picture of such a field that gets across the level of destruction because it just looks like a green mess.

This is a friend’s crop.. the whole field is just smashed stalks.

A destroyed canola field:

We didn’t think it could get worse, but further down the road we found this area was even more devastated, with just a few shattered canola stocks sticking up from the ground..

The trees suffered quite significantly too. From a distance, they looked like they do in early spring, just a green haze on them to suggest that leaves are budding. Instead, it is just fragments of leaves.