More than 1700 insurance claims have been filed by Alberta farmers bearing the brunt of severe weather. Hail and tornado level winds have damaged crops across central and Southern Alberta. “We do our hail claims by month so at the end of June we had just over 1200 claims so we are starting off July with almost 500” Nikki Booth, Agricultural Financial Services Corp., stated. Alberta has battled several weeks of severe weather. Severe thunderstorm warnings were issued just after noon, Monday, for central regions including the Red Deer, Ponoka, Innisfail and Stettler area and then extended south to include Airdrie, Cochrane, Olds and Sundre at around 12:40 p.m. Throughout the afternoon watches and warnings continued to extend south and east, with some areas flipping between the two as cells continued to track across the province. As of 7:54 p.m. all warnings in the province had been reduced to watches, with the only affected areas being east central regions. By 10 p.m., all watches had been dropped as well. Earlier in the day Environment Canada warned that conditions are favourable for the development of funnel clouds in the central regions. Source - globalnews.ca