A season of wild weather in Manitoba has made for some busy businesses and insurance companies.
“After a large storm like this it’s a higher volume of calls, maybe double, and earlier in the month it was maybe triple the phone calls,” J Max Collision & Glass operations manager George Semchuk told Global News.
“It feels a little busy, but we still make sure we take our time to have that car going back to brand new.”
Tim Prokipchuk, an estimator at J Max Collision & Glass, says he hasn’t seen a season quite like this.
“This is definitely the most severe storm that we’ve had in probably the last 10 years. The size of the hail, the severity of the damages is something that I personally have not seen before,” Prokipchuk said.
“We had one that was related to the tornado that touched down in south Winnipeg. The whole vehicle was peppered with shingles, glass was blown out, and the interior was completely destroyed from glass.”
It’s also meant a flood of calls to roofing companies.
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“We’ve been experiencing an unprecedented amount of calls,” said Don Fata, the sales and marketing manager at Pristine Roofing & Siding.
“Normally this time of year we’d be getting 60 to 70 calls a week. They’ve been (receiving) around 200 to 250 calls a week.”
Fata says crews are working lengthy hours, doing damage assessments and patching and tarping roofs.
“When there’s disaster it needs to be done right away,” he said.
A storm in southwestern Manitoba Sunday night brought golf-ball sized hail to the communities of Boissevain and Killarney.
“It was very loud and I was very worried about my window being shattered,” said Jacob Thain, who was driving through the Boissevain area at the time.
“About five minutes of some golf-ball sized hail and I did get some minor denting, I would say at least 100 dents across my hood and my roof.”
Boissevain resident Barry Lamb says the community has barely recovered from the previous storm that brought about seven inches of rain to the area.
“We were just recovering from flooded basements of sewage and water, so it’s been a rough week for the Boissevain area,” said Lamb, noting the local golf course had to be closed down after the hail damaged the greens.
In Killarney, local insurance company Lewis & Jones has also been inundated with calls.
“We started taking calls Sunday and then Monday, the calls were constant,” insurance broker Rob MacDonald said.
“Lots of roofs, shingles, we’ve even had lots of house windows broken as well. On the auto side there’s a ton of damaged vehicles as well. It’s just unreal how much damage that the storm did.”
Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI) has already seen a record number of hail claims, with 30,000 claims made in June. A spokesperson for MPI says about 28,000 of those claims were connected to the June 9th storm.
The intense weather is also likely to result in a record number of homeowner’s insurance claims.
“I haven’t seen any numbers yet, but I believe they will be astounding. I believe the number of claims is going to be quite high,” Insurance Brokers Association of Manitoba chief executive officer Grant Wainikka said.
Rob de Pruis with the Insurance Bureau of Canada says recurring extreme weather events will only continue to drive insurance premiums to new heights.
“Severe weather is increasing frequency and severity and that number just keeps going up. So because of those increased claims costs year after year, we could be seeing more pressure on insurance premiums,” de Pruis said.
According to Statistics Canada, 2020 to 2025 were in the top 10 costliest years for insurance claims related to catastrophic weather events, with 2024 being the costliest year with more than $8.6 billion in insurance claims.
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