Southern Alberta producers are picking up the pieces after a hard-hitting hailstorm pelted the Brooks area, about 160 kilometres southeast of Calgary, on Wednesday.
Curtis Harbinson’s cattle operation was among the areas devastated by the storm.Â
“I had my barn roof half lifted off,” he said.Â
Curtis Harbinson’s property took a heavy hit when a hailstorm plowed through the property. (Submitted by Abby Harbinson)
Harbinson said he was baling in his tractor when the storm hit.Â
“All of a sudden I can’t see,” he said. “And what I mean, I can’t see in the tractor. I was following the bale route, trying to find a fence sign so that I actually could get back to my truck.
“I stayed in the tractor,” he said. “[If] I didn’t, I might have got hurt, because we had golf ball-sized hail.”
Curtis Harbinson said numerous windows were smashed throughout his property during the Brooks-area hailstorm. (Submitted by Abby Harbinson)
Harbinson said the hailstorm was unlike anything he had ever seen.
“I’ve never had it where you couldn’t see where you were going,” he said. “I was disoriented.”
When he made it inside, Harbinson said he was shocked by the extent of the damage to his home.
“I get to my house, and I have no west side windows, nothing,” he said. “They’re smashed in into our room, bedrooms, our living room, our kitchen … we’re still picking up glass.”
The interior of Curtis Harbinson’s home suffered heavy damage during the Brooks-area hailstorm. (Submitted by Abby Harbinson)
Harbinson said he had to spend the following day recovering cattle that had left the property.
“The storm drove them right into the east fences,” he said. “Barbed wire fences don’t hold cows when there’s a storm like that. They want to get away from that storm as fast as possible. They actually went down the road … about half a mile.”
He said the amount of damage the property suffered means the farm is “basically starting from scratch again” after this incident.
“It does make you sick,” Harbinson said. “You can’t do anything about it. It’s life. You can’t change it.”
Curtis Harbinson said he’s still picking up shattered glass in his home after his property was hit hard by the Brooks-area hailstorm. (Submitted by Abby Harbinson)
Brad Niznik, who is celebrating his farm’s 100th anniversary on Saturday, also felt the hail’s impact firsthand, seeing significant damage to his crops.
“Just one of those years where you have high hopes and they’re just kind of dashed, ” he said.
WATCH: Brooks-area hailstorm hits southern Alberta hard:
Cleanup and repair work underway after severe storm hit Brooks, Alta., Wednesday night
Residents and crews in Brooks were hard at work cleaning up on Thursday after a severe storm hit the area. The CBC’s Terri Trembath went to the city to see how that’s going.
Niznik said he considers himself fortunate, as his property wasn’t hit as hard as other parts of the area.
“We just have to manage through these situations,” he said. “When [you’ve been] doing it for a long time, you realize these things are going to happen from time to time.”
Another operation, Brooks-based Happy Feet Farms, said in a Facebook post that it had lost 25 chickens in the storm.
‘Large storms are a fact of life’: Fortis
In a statement, Fortis Alberta said service had been restored to all customers impacted by the Brooks storm by Friday morning.
Fortis said financial details of the storm’s impact are not yet available.
“Though we don’t have a ready estimate, large storms are a fact of life in Alberta and we plan for and manage costs from events like this in the normal course of our operations,” the electricity provider said.