April 26, 2016

Yeowch!!

AP:

Thunderstorms bearing hail as big as grapefruit and winds approaching hurricane strength lashed portions of the Great Plains on Tuesday, but arrived without the destructive tornadoes that many had worried about for days.

We get hail here sometimes but it's never like that! Ours is the size of peas or smaller. Hail the size of a grapefruit is a weapon of mass destruction; cars parked outside can be destroyed. Buildings will be damaged; holes in roofs, windows out. A person hit by one of those can be injured or even killed.

This is "head for the storm cellar" weather even if there aren't any tornadoes.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 10:42 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 107 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Grape-sized hail can do a lot of damage.  Grapefruit-sized hail is seriously bad news.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 26, 2016 11:12 PM (PiXy!)

2 I flew through St.Louis last year, it was a day before storms with walnut-sized hail moved in. Stayed in Crawfordsville, Indiana overnight and watched all the busted cars on TV in the motel.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 27, 2016 05:29 AM (YIjaw)

3 Also! Actual hail was about 50 mm in diameter. If we talk grapfrut, that's a fairly stunted fruit. I saw mandarin oranges that big.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 27, 2016 05:48 AM (YIjaw)

4

I don't see how hail could really get to be the size of grapefruit. I think this is hyperbole or a simple reporting mistake.

I think I want to see photos before I believe it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 27, 2016 07:10 AM (+rSRq)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 27, 2016 07:12 AM (+rSRq)

6 I've never seen a hail storm comprised of anything bigger than baseball-sized, but I have seen hail stones grapefruit- or softball-sized.  They're usually isolated, rare stones.  There was a recent storm in Wylie, TX that was mostly plum- to baseball-sized.  Did approx. $1billion in damage.

Posted by: Ben at April 27, 2016 07:21 AM (DRaH+)

7 The largest I've personally experienced was penny- or dime-sized hail, and that's bad enough.  The hail we got during Stormageddon 2015, just over a year ago, was pea-sized or thereabouts.

I remember what it sounded like, hitting the roof vent for my heater... I can only imagine what it would have been like to have been outdoors in it, and I don't like what my imagination is picturing, no sir I don't.

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 27, 2016 03:39 PM (XQ5ac)

8 Got hit by a grape size hailstone once, running for shelter. It left quite a bruise, I expect I would have been hospitalized if I hadn't been able to find something to hide under.

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at April 28, 2016 02:06 AM (l55xw)

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