Tornadoes Get The Attention But Hail Storms (Sometimes) Cause More Of The Damage

Giant pre-dawn hail in Orange Beach, 
Alabama this morning.

 As is common in the spring, there was another outbreak of severe weather in the South Friday. 

Tornadoes get the attention in severe weather, and so far there have been no confirmed reports of anything like that.  Though, with further investigation, meteorologists might discover a few did indeed touch down. The lack of tornadoes, though, is probably why you haven't heard about this rough weather in the South. 

This time, it was hail that predominated.  There were a whopping 255 reports of large hail, from Friday afternoon through early this morning, with more than a dozen reports of hail stones at least as big as tennis balls. 

There's usually at least a couple big outbreaks of hail every spring like that. As noted, they don't get the attention, but hail outbreaks often turn out to be some of the most damaging storm events of any given year. 

A June, 2018 hail storm in Colorado caused about $2.3 billion in damage. Large hail stones around Phoenix, Arizona in October, 2010 caused about $4.5 billion in damage.  A hail storm propelled by winds as high as 80 mph caused $300 million in damage in just the town of Wylie, Texas in 2016.  

A hail barrage in Calgary, Alberta, Canada last year forced insurers to write off more cars than the total number sold annually in Alberta each year. 

I don't know whether Friday's and last night's widespread hail will have damage total as huge as those.  It'll depend if they targeted cities with plenty of roofs, windows, cars and trucks to trash. Surely, however, insurance adjusters will be awfully busy over the next days and weeks because of Friday's hail, which stretched from northern Texas to southern Alabama to North Carolina.

We do know that tennis and baseball sized hail came down in the suburbs south of Dallas-Fort Worth Friday.  Early this morning, baseball and tennis ball sized hail crashed down on the beaches, condos and resorts along the Alabama Gulf Coast. 

Big hail storms tend to focus on the same parts of the nation that tornadoes tend to congregate.  Here in Vermont, though, we can get damaging hail, just as the occasional tornado spins up, as one did last month in Middlebury. 

A supercell thunderstorm in Addison and Rutland counties caused widespread hail damage to cars, windows and roofs, especially around Proctor and downtown Rutland back in May, 2014.  In July, 2009 the  largest hail stones on record for Vermont fell on Westford. Some were three inches in diameter, or a little bigger than baseballs. 

 Video from the local CBS affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth: 

Large hail stones early this morning crashing down on a resort and its swimming pools in Orange Beach, Alabama:

When Weather Disaster Strikes, Picking Up The Pieces Takes Forever, Unfortunately

Damage from a huge hailstorm in Calgary, Canada
lingers four months after the storm. It shows the slow
pace of recovery typical of big disasters.
Photo by Helen Pike/CBC 

 We see it over and over again.  

A big, devastating storm strikes, and the media swoop in and cover the destruction, the heartbreak and loss, and then move on. 

It makes it easy to forget that the aftermath, the effort to pick up the pieces, often takes years.  You wonder if it will ever get done. Sometimes it doesn't. 

One example is a hail storm that struck Calgary, Alberta, Canada four months ago. The storm caused $1.5 billion in damage and severely damaged thousands of homes. A thick barrage of tennis ball sized hail wrecked so many walls, windows and roofs. 

Now, with winter setting in, most of the damage is still not repaired. 

It takes time for insurance adjusters to settle claims.  Then, thousands of people all at once compete to hire a limited number of contractors to fix the damage. Good luck getting anything done within a reasonable amount of time. 

Now winter is settling into Calgary.  This being Canada, it can get awfully cold up there. It often gets below zero there each winter, and the coldest it's ever been in Calgary is 46 below.

And now you have a lot of houses with damaged windows, roofs, and siding. Which allows cold and moisture to enter these houses, causing added damage. 

Making matters worse, the Alberta provincial government has provided disaster relief for flooding from the storm, but not hail damage, according to the CBC.  Just an example of bureaucracy not helping matters. 

The Calgary hail storm, bad as it was, didn't come close to the biggest calamity a town or city could endure. 

There's plenty of for instances.  The town of Paradise, California was practically wiped off the map by a deadly wildfire in 2018.  The town isn't close to being rebuilt.  Lots of people in the area have PSTD, made worse by nearby wildfires this year that choked the air in Paradise with smoke and briefly threatened to cause new destruction in town. 

A month before Paradise was literally lost, the town of Mexico Beach, Florida was flattened by Category 5 Hurricane Michael.  This is another town that hasn't recovered and won't anytime soon.  

Mexico Beach still has no gas stations, and the bank just re-opened early this month.  The town has so far only gotten half the money it needs to get its infrastructure back and running, as television station WFSU reports. A few houses have been rebuilt, but Mexico Beach is still largely empty lots. 

Here in Vermont, it really took at least five years to pretty much fully get the Green Mountain State back up to snuff after the extreme floods of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. 

The point of this post is to show that disasters are coming at a dizzying pace.  They dominate the news cycle for a day, a week, sometimes a month. Then we all forget, because the next catastrophe has hit. Meanwhile, the people in the earlier disaster zones are pretty much left to solve it on their own. 

I don't have a good solution here.  However, if the scientists are right, the pace of big weather disasters will continue to accelerate as the planet warms.  Which means more and more of us will find ourselves picking up the pieces and not sure if we have a decent future. 

Here's the CBC news piece that inspired today's post: