Hailstorm damage still a reality in Calgary as winter approaches
CALGARY — Coun. George Chahal steps onto the deck of a Saddle Ridge home and runs down a checklist of damage.
The vinyl siding is cracked and tattered. Parts of the screen door are hanging off the frame. The flashing around the windows, the eavestroughs, even the metal doorknob — damaged, damaged, damaged.
The back door’s handle is so deeply dented, it looks like it has been hit with a hammer.
“This is from hail,” Chahal said, pointing to the door. “Imagine the velocity — how fast and hard that hail came to damage a doorknob.
“This is the damage the whole ward has seen on thousands of homes. Anything that’s facing a westerly direction was damaged like this,” he said.
It’s been almost four months since a devastating June hailstorm hammered communities in northeast Calgary, across Chahal’s Ward 5. But on a wet, chilly Monday in October, countless homes are still in visible disrepair.
Chahal and Mayor Naheed Nenshi led a few of their council colleagues through the neighbourhood, where houses on every block have shredded exteriors and boarded up windows, as winter approaches.
The storm is the fourth costliest in Canadian history, with insured damages topping $1.2 billion. The provincial government offered disaster relief funding in the aftermath, but only for uninsurable losses such as overland flooding, excluding hail and sewer backup damage because that coverage is considered readily available.
But many residents say they weren’t prepared to take on expensive repairs or pay insurance deductibles during the turmoil of the COVID19 pandemic and, in many cases, even people who had adequate insurance are still waiting for companies to process their claims. A group of residents have formed the Hailstorm Action Committee and rallied at the legislature in Edmonton and McDougall Centre in Calgary, calling for more help.
Chahal added that for many residents, this is their first time navigating the insurance claims process. More than 60 per cent of the people who live in northeast Calgary neighbourhoods including Saddle Ridge and Taradale are immigrants, according to Statistics Canada. And in those two neighbourhoods, eight per cent of people reported having knowledge of neither English nor French, compared to just two per cent of Calgary’s population overall.