Picture it:
September 3, 1970 – Coffeyville, Kansas. A hailstone weighing 1.67 pounds, with a diameter of 5.5 inches, hit the ground at an estimated speed of 100 m.p.h. It was officially recorded as the heaviest hailstone to hit the ground in the entire world.
July 6, 1928 – Potter, Nebraska. Hailstones weighing up to one-and-a-half pounds, measuring four-and-a-half to almost five-and-a-half inches in diameter. They fell 10 to 15 feet apart. They came down with a peculiar hissing sound, which indicates they arrived at great speeds. Many of the hailstones impacted themselves in the ground.
September 5, 1898 – Nodaway, Missouri. Hailstones crashing through the roofs of houses.
1897 – Topeka, Kansas. Hailstones the size of oranges and grapefruit crashed through the wooden tops of streetcars.
March 25, 1992 – Orlando, Florida. Hail the size of grapefruit plunging from the sky at high speeds.
1998 – Fort Collins, Colorado. Lightening sets off an alarm that locks factory workers outdoors. They were pelted with marble size hail.
April 30, 1888 – India. Deadliest hail storm on record, killing 246 people and 1,600 head of cattle.
July 19, 1932 – China. 200 people killed. Large hail plummets from the sky for 2 full hours. Thousands of people and animals are injured. Homes and crops destroyed.
1986 – Addison Airport near Dallas, Texas. A small plane’s windshield is smashed by hail. The plane crashes. The pilot dies.
1991 – United States. Property damage due to hail is estimated ay $412 million dollars.
May 11, 1894 – Bovina, Mississippi. What appeared to be a 6 by 8 inch hailstone turned out to be an gopher turtle encased in ice.
March 17, 1939 – Hyderabad, India. A hailstone weighing seven-and-a-half pounds hit the ground.
August 18, 1925 – Southeastern Iowa. Damage to fields of corn left local farmers penniless. Many had to leave their land to find work. Losses were estimated at five million dollars.
July 11, 1990 – Colorado Springs. The costliest hailstorm in U.S. history. Hail measuring in size from golf ball to baseball-size destroyed thousands of roofs, tens of thousands of vehicles, windows, street lights, and traffic signals.
1984 – Munich, Germany. A world record hailstorm caused more then one billion dollars in damages.
What is this vicious phenomenon known as the white plague? It’s hail. What is hail made of? A million cloud droplets form one raindrop; 10 billion cloud droplets form a golf ball-size hailstone.
How does hail form so rapidly? The formation of hailstones is extremely complex scientific process. To put it simply, when frozen raindrops or small ice particles meet with supercooled water droplets during a thunderstorm, they freeze into icy embryos. When this embryo is held suspended inside the clouds by strong updrafts from a storm, it continually develops new layers of ice. The inside of a large hailstone looks similar to an onion, with distinctive layering of between opaque ice and clear ice.
A severe storm can produce wind speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. When this happens, twigs, stones, nuts, insects and even small animals can be picked up and added to the mix. The gopher turtle mentioned above is an example of such an occurrence.
The gopher turtle is not the only odd incident of that nature. In Essen, Germany, during a severe thunderstorm, a hailstone bigger than an egg turned out to be a one and a half inch carp.
In 1930, 5 German glider pilots over the Rone Mountains found themselves facing a horrific storm. Knowing that the wind and turbulence would tear their gliders apart, the airmen bailed out. As they opened their parachutes, the storm’s vicious updrafts hurled them in a band of supercooled water droplets. They soon became encased in ice. Four of the airmen froze to death before reaching the ground. One pilot survived the fall.
4,800 hailstorms hit the United States yearly. Cheyenne, Wyoming, is hit hardest, receiving 8 to 10 hailstorms annually. Throughout the world, Paris has approximately 10 hailstorms annually; Wurttemberg, Germany, records an average of 13 per year.
* THE FARMER’S NIGHTMARE: THE WHITE PLAGUE OF HAIL *
Ancient reports of hail damage are demonstrated in the Bible: “Throughout the land . . . the hail struck down everything in the fields, man and beast. It struck all the crops and shattered every tree in the field.”
Hail played a part in the start of the French Revolutionary War. July 13, 1788, hailstorms caused crop damage to more than a thousand peasant communes. This lead to starvation, which some historians attribute to the beginning of the war.
From 1944 through 1953, estimated hail damage to crops in Kansas totaled nearly $102 million Hail is reported to damage more than $100 million of U.S. crops annually.
And now, my friend, you know why they call hailstorms of high magnitude THE WHITE PLAGUE.
