The approaching storm made the sky Wizard of OZ green. We would have been lucky if only Dorothy fell out of the sky.
Instead, we got Hailapalooza 2013.
It was the worst hailstorm I’ve ever seen in my life. And it brought a whole new meaning to “Hail State.”
Baseball to softball-sized chunks of ice fell on the Jackson metro area. Clinton got pummeled. Cars downtown look like they had a bad case of teenage acne. The noise in the State Capitol was so deafening you could barely hear the bloviating within.
I’m sure Carter’s Jewelers will have a hail sale. 50% off all ice. (Of course, I think they’re already closed due to damage from heavy dew.) The auto dealers will follow suit. Nine out of ten people in the Jackson metro area are ticked off by Mother Nature’s tantrum yesterday. The tenth person owns a glass company. I’ve see hail before. But that was HAIL. To quote Courtney Lange, “Even Mississippi’s hail is fat.”
I was at Lemuria Books around 4 p.m.. Someone said, “Is it that green outside because of the pollen?” I looked out the front and felt my stomach drop. I had seen the sky like that before — Right before a tornado.
I politely said, “Buh bye” and ran to my car. The wall cloud was approaching from West Jackson and it looked ominous. I cranked my car, weaved through a few backstreets and parking lots and got on I-55.
WHAM!
The first piece of ice struck my windshield with a sickening thud.
There were no weather reports on the radio, so I called my wife’s cell. She didn’t pick up (my son was probably playing Angry Birds) so I tried the house phone. “Hello?” she said. I answered, “Am I about to be blown to OZ?”
WHAM! WHAM!
The clouds were boiling and the hail was falling.
Hail is a water droplet that circulates up and down in the cloud until it is too heavy for the winds to support it. The stronger the storm, the stronger the winds, the bigger the hail. That’s why a hail stone has rings like an onion. Yesterday’s storm was, as we like to say in the South, a biggun’. By the time the hail dropped out of the sky, it had grown to the size of baseballs in some place.
“Get to County Line Road and you’ll be OK. That’s where the hail stops.” We had had nickel-sized hail earlier at the house. I just had to get past all the people who thought it would be a good strategy to slam on their brakes and have their cars beat to death by hail stones.
I drove like a bat out of, well, hail. And was rewarded with a dent-free car.
But the pictures are incredible. So many of you had serious damage to your cars and homes. I’m sure it will be a major insurance event. Chaos had a big day in Jackson, Mississippi.
The National Weather Service published an incredible picture of the supercell thunderstorm as it headed into Brandon. To the left of the cloud, the sky is sickeningly green. That’s what I’ll remember about yesterday. The day ice fell from the sky.