photo courtesy Canadian Press

By Chantal Wagner

extreme hot & cold temperatures for the hat

“Calgary Hailer” Environment Canada’s top weather story of the year

Dec 29, 2020 | 4:40 PM

“Calgary’s Billion Dollar Hailer”, the storm that featured baseball-size hailstones, propelled by 70 kilometers per hour wind was Canada’s top weather story of the year according to Environment Canada.

Senior Climatologist David Phillips says it did a lot of damage in a matter of eleven minutes on June 13, 2020.

That storm created $1.3 billion in terms of insurance losses in the northeast neighbourhoods of the city.

“Insurance is not always a good indicator of economic hardship,” Phillips said. “When you’re just looking at new cars, there were more cars written off in that storm than are sold in the province of Alberta in a year. So it just shows you the big-ticket item it was.”

The Calgary Hailer was also the fourth most expensive insured natural disaster in Canadian history.

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Homes were pummelled with large hailstones, creating extensive damage to exteriors with holes in siding and windows.

Vegetable gardens were turned into coleslaw and trees lost their branches.

Phillips says many have not recovered yet and have not received their payouts from the insurance industry.

Here in Medicine Hat and the region, the year started off with the cold weather wave during the second week of January.

Temperatures dipped down to minus 37 degrees with the windchill.

“There was a lot of frozen water pipes, propane lines, and cold vehicle batteries had to get started,” Phillips said.

Then the heat came at the end of July and beginning of August.

“I remember talking to people in Medicine Hat when we saw the heat really arrive. We saw 12 or 14 days where the temperature got above 30 degrees including three days in a row where the temperature got above 35.”

Phillips says our harvest in the southern part of Alberta was far better than last year with ideal conditions in September and October.

Winter was back again during the first weekend of November, with over 20 centimeters of snowfall and high winds.

Meantime, the second weather story from Environment Canada was the B.C September sky, all smoke and no fires.

The California, Washington, and Oregon fires came north and fumigated 4 million people in B.C and moved west into Alberta, Phillips added.

And the third story from Environment Canada was the flooding in Fort McMurray in the spring which was worth more than half-billion dollars in damage. 90 percent of that went to commercial properties.

“Emergency measures people were telling people, on one hand, telling people to self isolate, stay indoors, don’t go out, and stay socially distanced. And then in the next breath were saying head for the hills because of rising waters and so it was almost a contradiction of messages,” Phillips said.