Lee Moats took a crop tour on the weekend he won’t forget anytime
soon.
The Riceton, Sask., farmer wanted to see what kind of damage was
caused by an Aug. 6 hailstorm that unleashed its wrath about five
kilometres north of his home quarter.
When Moats and his family arrived at the epicentre of the storm, they
couldn’t believe what they witnessed. Steam was rising off hail piled
15 centimetres high on the ground. It reminded him of an eerie scene
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straight out of a Hollywood movie.
“We have never seen anything like it and aren’t likely to ever see it
again. It was just absolutely spectacular,” said Moats.
Some of the hailstones were golf-ball- sized, but it was the sheer
volume of what fell from the heavens that was so awe-inspiring.
“You’re in summer and then all of the sudden you’re in winter. It was
cold. It was probably 10 or 15 degrees colder in the area where the
hail was than outside of it,” he said.
It felt like the middle of January travelling along the grid road. At
one spot Moats stopped the truck and stared out the driver’s window at
his flattened lentil field and then out the passenger window at his
decimated canola crop.
He wasn’t too crestfallen by the damage because it wasn’t a good crop
to begin with and a lot of the hail fell on fields that Moats was
unable to seed this spring due to flooding.
The same can’t be said for his neighbour, who managed to get
everything seeded.
“He had quite a nice crop by comparison and he won’t have an acre to
combine. It’s just all gone. It’s pretty devastating for him,” said
Moats.
The Riceton storm will add to Saskatchewan’s growing number of hail
claims.
The Canadian Crop Hail Association said there were 5,500 claims in
the province as of Aug. 3, which is more than double the amount reported
two weeks prior to that.
“We’ve been fairly active here over the last two weeks. Up until that
point we were actually kind of below normal,” said CCHA chair Murray
Bantle.
Alberta’s claim total was approaching 1,700 last week, which is
slightly less than average for this point in the growing season.
Manitoba is well below normal with 600 claims filed, partially due to
the fact that a lot of acres went unseeded in that province.
Bantle said hail insurance sales were generally on par with last
year, except for southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba.
What the insurance companies lost in volume in that flooded out
region they made up for in higher coverage levels in the rest of the
prairie region thanks to strong crop prices.
“Sales went really well,” he said. Bantle said prairie-wide claims
volumes are slightly below normal but the crop damage associated with
some of the late-July and early- August storms has been more severe
than normal.
Moats said that is certainly the case in his area. His brother’s yard
looked like a war zone in the aftermath of the storm.
“The big loss there that we’re concerned with is it looks like his
trees may be all either dead or damaged to the extent that they’re not
going to recover.”
