Tennis ball-sized hail falls in Radisson, Langham amid Sask. extreme weather
Widespread storms destroy tree rows, gardens, windshields
Hail, rain, sheet lightning, extreme winds and even a funnel cloud were reported in Saskatchewan on Wednesday night, leaving people to deal with the damages.
Reports of hail compared to eggs, loonies and quarters came from all over the province, but the towns of Radisson and Langham got the worst of it, with hail the size of tennis balls or baseballs cracking multiple car windshields. Other towns hit by hail included North Battleford, Mendham, Blumenthal, Sceptre and Hague.
"It was black, our trees were, I want to say horizontal," said Brigitte Schentag, a resident of Radisson. "The wind was so crazy. So we ran upstairs and we started to hear loud bangs, like literally sounded like gunshots. So we looked out the window and sure enough, golf ball sized."
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She said that once the weather calmed down, they went out to find a big dent in the hood of their vehicle, cracked siding and bits of their eavestroughs scattered around.
Brigitte Schentag, who lives just off the Yellowhead Highway in Radisson, Sask, sustained hail damage to the siding of her home. (Brigitte Schentag)
Crawford Luke, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), said the biggest and most extreme of the storms formed in the late afternoon along the Alberta border.
"A lot of people across west-central Saskatchewan would have had at least a good lightning show yesterday, if not some severe weather," Luke said.
"Things really got going around 6 p.m. around the Battlefords, especially a really intense storm there. It kind of tracked down the Yellowhead essentially, and maybe just north of Saskatoon, eventually ended up over at Humboldt. We saw quite a few storms in the area."
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Funnel clouds have been reported near Martensville and Middle Lake, along with an unconfirmed tornado report from Cudworth. Further south, more storms formed and followed along the Trans-Canada Highway.
Gunjan Sinha, a geoscientist and amateur storm chaser, followed the storm from North Battleford, to the Radisson area, all the way to Saskatoon.
"That strobe lightning was probably the strongest I've seen since 2010," Sinha said.
Gunjan Sinha says he has been chasing storms for 22 years now, and this has been a rather slow year for big thunderstorms up to this point. (Gunjan Sinha)
He said there were up to a thousand bolts in just one minute, and the hail nearly caught up to him and his vehicle. Although Sinha didn't see a tornado himself, he said that with the radar signature, it is likely there were several that were small and short lived.
"I was racing before it got to me, but I could hear the hail. So whenever you're in that particular part of the storm, it doesn't really rain a lot. It hails.… I almost got caught. I have some fun dash camera footage."
Environment and Climate Change Canada says it has already received multiple reports of damages from the storm, and more are expected to come in the following days. (Jeff Wizniak)
Hayley Schwendemann from Neuanlage, Sask., owns Pickle Patch Gardens, a small produce business ravaged by the hail. She said she spent Wednesday evening praying in her basement with her kids.
"It went from being kind of dusk to all of a sudden black," Schwendemann said. "It was very windy. You could hear the hail hitting the house like baseball bats.… There was no thunder, but the house was shaking. People always say when there's a tornado it sounds like a train is coming, and it definitely sounded like that outside."
Though skies were blue Thursday, Schwendemann said her garden was laid completely flat and many of the trees in her yard came down during the previous night's storm. (Germain Wilson/CBC)
"You put a lot of hopes and dreams into that, and then you work hard all summer trying to get it somewhere, and now it's gone," she said.
The strongest wind gusts recorded on the day were from North Battleford, according to Luke. There are two ECCC weather stations in the area; one of them recorded 129 km/h, and the other recorded 113 km/h.
Elsewhere in the province, Kindersley saw gusts up to 116 km/h, Leader reached 111 km/h and Swift Current hit 93 km/h.
Luke said supercells are the type of thunderstorm usually responsible for large hail reports.
"When we're seeing tennis ball-sized hail, for example, this was like a monster supercell thunderstorm that was producing that hail, and basically the reason for that is these thunderstorms have a stronger updraft, so they're able to support heavier objects," Luke said.
"That really speaks to how powerful and how strong that thunderstorm was."
According to ECCC, 5,750 lightning strikes were recorded within a 50 kilometre radius of Saskatoon during yesterday's storms, the most in one day since 2022.
Saskatoon receives an average of 16,228 strikes from May through September, according to data recorded since 2013. Last night's storm put Saskatoon at 17,141 for 2025, above the average for the season.
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This article, written by Alex Kozroski, was originally published for CBC News.