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The cleanup is underway in Lumsden after a hailstorm left vehicles dented and windows cracked on Thursday.
Golf ball-sized hail was spotted in the Lumsden area, and many people are now reporting damage to their property after the storm.
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Meredith Schmidt said she was driving home when the hailstorm hit.
“It was absolutely crazy. I work in Lumsden, and I left thinking ‘I am going to get out of this before it hits.’ I couldn’t even get home – and I don’t live very far outside of Lumsden,” she said.
“The hail started coming down, I was in the middle of nowhere and I was like ‘Ah!’ Just trying to find a bush to put my car under, which I think helped.”
Schmidt said she went for a walk on Friday morning and heard from a lot of people who suffered worse damage during the storm than she did.
“I was just talking to a friend whose husband has an actual hole in the windshield of his vehicle that was outside,” she said.
“Another friend of ours has a crack in the window casing on his house.”
Schmidt says she is sure there will be a lot of insurance claims due to the hail damage.
Brendan Shuba was in Lumsden on Thusday when he heard the hail start to come down.
“I was just lounging around and then I started hearing faint little ticks of hail coming down, and before I even had a chance to turn around there was a wall of hail bouncing around, pelting off the roofs and windows,” he said.
Shuba said the hail was exceptionally large.
“The ones I had grabbed had already shrunk a little bit, but I would say golf ball-sized hail, judging by the damage to my vehicle and my neighbours’ gazebo,” he said.
“There is hail damage to my car, hail damage to my house. It cracked a couple of the windows. My vehicle itself had the window cracked and hail dents all over.”
Shuba said the aftermath of the hailstorm left a lot of leaves and fallen trees on the roads.
“I was checking out the town myself, and it looked like there was everyone out driving around and checking it out. The town has a bunch of cleanup (to do) on Main Street.”
Darby Wild was also right in the middle of the storm.
“We were basically coming down the Lumsden hill to turn off into Lumsden. It started raining heavily, and then the hail started to hit the car,” she explained.
“We decided to go down under the overpass, and there were as many cars as we could jam in there… It was huge hail. The ground was just white, and it was pretty scary.”
She said there was quite a bit of damage to the windshield of her vehicle.
Meanwhile, the Ogema area also had a tornado warning Thursday, but Environment Canada said there were no reports of any tornadoes touching down.
Stormy weekend in store for parts of Saskatchewan
Meteorologist Robin Dyck said the storms were due to a low-pressure system slowly tracking through the northern prairies.
“It’s now sitting in northern Saskatchewan, and it’ll continue to track east into northern Manitoba over the next few days, but with that we have basically a really warm and humid air mass sitting over southern Saskatchewan,” Dyck explained.
She said there was a trough of low pressure air that created severe thunderstorms over parts of the province on Thursday.
“We had some watches out for those, and they did develop, so we are expecting similar things to happen today (Friday) for southern Saskatchewan,” the meteorologist explained.
Dyck said the low-pressure system is expected to move east into Manitoba after Friday, and said the stormy conditions the province has seen in recent days could start to improve by the weekend or early next week.
“It is just pretty unsettled, and things won’t really clear out until we really get the low-pressure system moving into Manitoba and some more stable weather moving in from the west, probably around Monday,” she said.
Dyck said the thunderstorms the province has seen in recent days are known as supercells.
“Those particular thunderstorms are the more severe variety, and they can produce tornadoes. This is a similar setup for today,” she said.
“It is shifted a little bit to the east compared to yesterday, but yes, we are expecting similar thunderstorms today.”
