A motorist sits in a truck partially buried in slushy hail near Amarillo, Texas. Weather service crews are assessing the damage from a Texas Panhandle storm that dumped several feet of nickel-sized hail, stranded motorists in muddy, hail drifts and closed a highway for several hours.
AP
Maintenance crews worked Thursday to clear roads after a storm dumped several inches of hail on parts of the Texas Panhandle, trapping motorists in muddy drifts that were waist-to-shoulder high.
The storm left so much hail in its wake that workers had to use snow plows to clear the piles from the road.
“It was crazy,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Justyn Jackson said about the strange storm, which hit Wednesday afternoon. The hail was “real small” but there was a lot of it in a concentrated area, accumulating 2- to 4-feet deep, he said.
The rural area where the storm struck was mainly ranch land, about 25 miles north of Amarillo and south of Dumas. Rainwater gushed across the parched land, washing dirt and then mud into the hail, pushing it all onto U.S. 287, Potter County Sheriff Brian Thomas said.
“There were just piles of hail,” said Maribel Martinez with the Amarillo/Potter/Randall Office of Emergency Management. “Some of the cars were just buried in hail and people were trapped in their cars.”
Wild Thing’s comment……
Someone better tell Al Gore about this……. what happened to his Global warming.
They were lucky that the hailstones were small ones. In the Dallas/Ft Worth area insurance companies pay out more claim money for hail damage then for any other act of nature. If that had been golfball or baseball sized hail there would have been immeasurable damage and probably some serious injuries. When I lived in Denver a freak hailstorm came through and completely destroyed half a dozen houses. Badly damaged cars numbered in the thousands. Several years ago a similar freak hailstorm in Ft Worth sent dozens of people to ERs with bad head wounds. Mother Nature is awesome!
Tom, wow I never knew that about Dallas/Ft Worth.
Thanks too for sharing about Denver.