Extreme weather update
I think we all might have guessed that the one of us most likely to sustain property damage due to severe weather would be Qian, who miraculously managed to stay on the good side of Charley, Frances, and Jeanne. But this afternoon we had three-inch hail here in Socorro. Instead of having four skylights, we now have four giant holes in our ceiling (and we had a mess of glass shards, rain, and hail inside). Our car windshield is cracked in many places, but I got pretty lucky compared to most of the cars in the NRAO Socorro parking lot. Many cars no longer had a windshield at all... or a rear windshield, or side windows.
All that ice might have been a beautiful sight if it weren't so destructive.
All that ice might have been a beautiful sight if it weren't so destructive.
8 Comments:
Yikes, I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope it's all covered by insurance? As I've learned in the last few months though, if the people are ok then we can consider ourselves fortunate. I wish a speedy recovery from the storm damage for you and all the people in Socorro.
Oh, no! :( I hope you can get your windows and stuff fixed soon. Three inch hail is pretty big (that's like a golf ball, right?).
I think 3-inch hail is considerably larger than golf ball size. A golf ball is around 1.68 inches in diameter and a tennis ball is around 2.5 inches. So 3-inch hail is a pretty damn big chunk of ice.
I guess that shows how much I know about sports.
Here's local reportage on the storm. Unfortunately, the on-line version doesn't have the photos that the print edition does.
One of my colleagues took some digital pictures (directory) of the damage in the NRAO parking lot and his home. Here's a ball of hail. Some of the photos of damaged vehicles are impressive.
The article refused to load for me, but man, those are impressively scary pictures. Especially that Saturn coupe. It looked like somebody took a sledgehammer to it. It also looks like it has some fiber-glass or composite body panels that didn't stand up to the hail at all well. I can see that the body shops there are going to be as busy as roofers in Florida.
Utilities are flaky here even in good weather, and another thunderstorm moved through Socorro about two hours ago. For an hour afterward, we had no internet service, so I'd guess that neither did the El Defensor Chieftain.
That is pretty scary... I guess you can tell fairly well which cars in the picture use laminated glass in the side windows and which ones don't.
When I was a kid I used to read those Little House on the Prairie books. (yeah, yeah) Anyway, part of The First Four Years, describes a hailstorm that was a lot like this. (in Dakota Territory, IIRC) It was pretty hard for me to imagine such a thing happening.
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