Hail and dent repair for Calgary.

Calgary has taken two separate billion-dollar hailstorms in five years, and they did not hit the same part of town. On 5 August 2024 a storm crossed the city between 7:45 and 8:30 in the evening and produced C$3.25 billion in insured losses and more than 130,000 claims, making it the second-costliest disaster in Canadian history. Four years earlier, on 13 June 2020, the damage core was a 10 to 15 square kilometre pocket of northeast Calgary, hit inside 10 to 15 minutes, with hail up to tennis-ball size falling at 80 to 100 km/h.

That is the single most useful thing to know about hail here. Two storms, both records, both landing somewhere different. Your street's history tells you very little about your car, which is why we scan every panel instead of pricing off a storm date.

The 2024 numbers are measured rather than guessed. The Northern Hail Project runs 20 hail disdrometers inside Calgary city limits, and ten of them were struck that evening, recording a large amount of 30 mm hail.

The question we field most in Calgary is whether a car is about to be written off, and it is usually asked by somebody whose neighbour's was. You cannot tell from their car. A write-off is a cost decision rather than a safety one: the insurer weighs the repair estimate against what the vehicle is actually worth and calls a total loss when the repair costs more than the car does. Paintless repair changes that arithmetic directly, because it takes out the panel replacement, the sanding, the filler and the repaint that push a conventional hail estimate over the line. On a Calgary car carrying dents from two different storms the older damage is part of that number too, which is one more reason not to ride a claim through a second season.

Two things decide a Calgary claim and neither of them is the storm. The first is the date of loss. Your insurer wants one, and with two major storms in recent memory plus smaller cells every summer, plenty of people genuinely cannot say which one did it. Hail does not heal, so earlier damage is still claimable; we document what is on the panels and let the adjuster place the date. The second is pressure about where the work goes. Calgary has more dealerships and more body shops than anywhere else in the province, and they, plus your insurer's preferred network, will all happily recommend. In Alberta the choice is yours. A preferred network is a commercial arrangement between a shop and an insurer, not a rule that binds you, and nobody needs your signature at a folding table to prove it.