While Southern Alberta has been hit with numerous storms this summer, it seems Airdrie has been spared.
This month, Environment Canada has issued five severe thunderstorm warnings for Airdrie and surrounding areas.
Short periods of heavy rain, hail and strong winds have hit the city, but it seems this is an ongoing trend for Alberta summers.
Bill McMurty, meteorologist with Environment Canada, said that while it seems there has been an increased number of storms in 2013, it is not unlike last year.
These thunderstorms have brought severe flooding that devastated Calgary, Siksika First Nations and High River in late June.
In addition to record flooding levels, hail and wind storm devastated the town of Irricana, where homes and farms were damaged by record amounts of hail.
However, while the storms had motorists pull over and residents frantically escaping the downpour of hail, power to Airdrie homes has not been affected by the high winds and lightning strikes.
“We did have several small outages with pockets of customers without power the past two weeks from the lightning and wind, but they were in the rural areas, not the city of Airdrie, specifically” Jennifer MacGowan, director of corporate communications with Fortis Alberta said.
“We’ve had one major outage north of Beiseker on July 18 from 11 p.m. and power was restored at 2:40 a.m.”
That outage affected 545 customers, according to MacGowan.
According to The Weather Network – a national weather service that records precipitation records – the average rainfall for the month of July is 68 mm, and the single-day record for precipitation occurred July 15 1927, where 95 mm fell in one day.
Levels of rainfall nor the number of lightening strikes for the month of July were not available as of press time.
