Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Hail the size of baseballs pummels north Texas

This is one thing we don't have in California.



8 comments:

  1. Yep, we were sitting right on the bullseye. Fortunately the car was under a large live oak and only sustained one very minor ding.

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    1. Were they that big where you were?

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    2. Our neighbor had a couple that size. I didn't go outside to look for any.

      My bride is from California and she was freaked out by the storms we have here. I had just installed living room skylights in our new-to-us house back in '83 when we had grapefruit sized hailstones. One came through the new skylight and landed on the couch in the living room. Got a new roof out of that one.

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  2. I've seen what damage golf ball size hail can do first hand. Getting hit with something that size is a trip to the hospital...or the morgue.

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  3. When I was growing up in Texas, there were fairly frequent hailstorms, a few of which were of that size. One memorable one was when we were travelling in west Texas near the little town of Muleshoe (no laughing! - they had terrific tomatoes the size of salad plates!) where we had to take cover under an abandoned gas station's awning when we saw the greenish black storm clouds bearing down on us. Good thing we did, since the stones were about the size pictured. When those storms hit a city, many millions of dollars in damage result - house windows and roofs, cars, crops as well. And as Ray mentioned, human casualties. The noise is really terrifying, too!

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  4. I've been through baseball-sized hail some years ago. The ground was soft from a earlier hard rain, so when these babies came whistling down, they made little impact craters everywhere. At the time I had a Victorian home with cedar shakes on a steeply pitched roof. It made a racket, needless to say, but the shakes were new (lucky for me) so the hailstones just bounced off. My neighbors with their ranch home composite shingles were screwed. As I stood on the veranda taking all this in, a young couple (strangers) in a canvas topped jeep jerked in to the curb on my side, bailed out and came running up the walk to shelter under my veranda. Their jeep was pretty trashed within a few minutes.. If you're ever in a hailstorm like this, try looking up into the sky from your shelter. Damn things look like they just materialize out of thin air, they're moving so fast.

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  5. Yep, I live on ground zero on this one and have dents in my old pickup this size. Fortunately, no windows busted like my neighbors and the roof is class 4. Beat the crap out of the whirlybirds on the roof though.

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  6. Thank God that thing missed us here in Dallas. The news said something like $425 million in damage.

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