Our annual August trip to the family cabin in northwestern Saskatchewan started (or so we thought) with a bit of a bang.
My sister was there a week before and reported not just water coming into the place but also exploding light bulbs.
Oh, hail, I thought, along with some more unprintable words. Besides, we just had the roof fixed last year.
Preemptively, I called our insurance agent to warn him that hail damage was a pretty good possibility. My husband had already contacted our roofing contractor and confirmed that a hail of a storm, complete with plow winds, had hurled its way through the district Aug. 1.
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We packed up the car a couple of days early and with some trepidation headed north. The closer we came, the sicker I felt.
Trees were downed, but the worst sights were the fields of hailed-out wheat. The crops weren’t just flattened; they were snapped and crushed.
That provided some perspective. We may have some holes in our rustic little cabin’s roof, but these crops were gone. It was tragic.
Those fields were clearly beautiful and bountiful two weeks before.
This area has also been among the wettest on the Prairies this year. The town of Dorintosh has had about 500 millimetres of rain since April, but most of it since mid-June.
The effect on nearby lakes has been spectacular. Our lake is up a metre, I would estimate, and one day Greig Lake is going to spill its banks over the road if this keeps up.
Mixed forests around the lakes are steeping in several inches to a couple of feet of water. If you’re hiking, you have to be really careful of what was once muskeg but is now a pond or creek.
But I digress. The roofer found no significant damage, thank goodness (although he did tar up some of the steeper roof slopes, bless him).
The cabin area was lucky that day; in the campground, not a single vehicle – car, truck or camper – escaped hail damage.
Apparently, auto claims on hail damage are something like double the last two bad hail years, although crop claims are running at about normal.
But if it was your crop the great white combine decided to flatten, that’s little comfort.
