Oh Bloody Hail

It was another exciting Friday night at the Lee home. I had driven the Explorer to work on Friday because my car had a tire with a leak. Mike was going to take the car to the garage near his office to be repaired. On the way home, Mike calls and says its hailing in Kasson, so get home. I was five minutes from our driveway so I figured I would have no problem. Kasson is about 10 miles away.

Thirty seconds after I hung up the phone, the hail hit. It came down so hard, I had to pull over to the side of Highway 14. It started out as pea sized hail and quickly grew to marble sized. Before I knew it, it was the size of golf balls. It pelted the Explorer for ten minutes straight. I just sat there, knowing what this hail was doing to our truck. Madison and I were both terrified. I'm really surprised it didn't break the windshield. When it finally stopped, I drove to Mike's office on roads covered in three inches of ice. The car had been parked under the tree, so we thought it was relatively well protected.

I followed Mike home where we found piles of hail all over our yard. Our siding had holes in it, our deck had dents from the ice chunks, and chunks of asphalt from the roof were all over the place. We also found cracked siding and roof damage on the garage and all of the gutters.

Once the water dried off the truck, we started looking for damage. We didn't have to look hard. The entire hood and roof and dimpled with hundreds of dents. Both front quarter panels have large dents. The paint on the hood is very chipped up as is the front windshield. Friday night, the car didn't look so bad and we had only found a few major dents. By Saturday morning, when it had finally dried completely, we could see that the car was nearly as bad as the truck with damage to the hood, roof and trunk. The doors and front and rear quarter panels on the passenger side are also heavily damaged as is the windshield.

Now, there certainly are bigger problems in the world. The house and cars can be fixed and insurance will cover all of it except for the two thousand dollars in deductibles. (UGH!) It certainly is not the end of the world. It is, however, a bit disheartening. We have been working so hard on our home - it was really starting to come together to be a home that we loved. It's hard to see that damaged in just a few short minutes.

Our vehicles are fairly new - a 2005 Malibu and a 2004 Explorer. Malibu's are a dime a dozen and I'm not so concerned about that. But the Explorer, we are both very sad about. We wanted that truck for about two years before we broke down and bought it new. It doesn't have many miles on it and it still looked and smelled like a brand new SUV. We have both loved driving the Explorer and it is great for the activities we love, like camping and boating.

Many of our neighbors had damage as well. I feel so bad for my next door neighbor. All three of his cars received major damage, and he only had full coverage on one of them. He has been working so hard preparing for his daughter's graduation party that was today. I have watched him groom his lawn and plant flowers over the past few weeks - only to have all of his hard work wiped out in just a few minutes. The flowers no longer have petals - they just look like weeds now and his beautiful larger plants are just shredded. He wanted it to look so nice for his daughter's party.

The photos show the size of one hail ball. This photo was taken about two hours AFTER the storm and it is still larger than a marble. It was 70 degrees here at the time, so it definetely had opportunity to melt!

Our lawn was still covered in hail when we went to bed on Friday night.

So - we are hoping State Farm will send a disaster team to Rochester. Many people in our area sustained damage, especially to their cars. Hopefully, they aren't too busy in the Twin Cities area where tornados and baseball sized hail hit last weekend and where they were hit with storms again last night.