Just for the record: It’s mid-May. In Southern California. It was 101 degrees this past Saturday. While driving to work on Thursday, I heard them say there was a chance of showers in the afternoon. My thought was an eyebrow-raising :dubious: “Rain?” …But then I figured they meant something along the lines of the drizzle that we get this time of year from the heavy marine layer.
No. Oh, no. It wasn’t that. But I don’t think even the “they” people thought it would be…THIS.
That’s not snow, folks. That’s HAIL. Marble-sized hail. And a lot of it.
That was the view from our school library. I took photos and videos from my camera phone, but the librarian apparently grabbed one of the school digital cameras and got these pics.
In 21 years in Southern California, I have never, ever seen ANYthing like this. Hell (or is it “hail”?), I don’t think I ever saw anything like this in Indiana, except maybe a few wild thunderstorms that brought tornados to the area–but I have no memory of hail accumulating on the ground.
It started during 6th period (thank GOD I have 6th period prep). It started raining. Huh, I think. Then the hail started–small pebble-sized ones. Neat, I think, and weird. But it kept going. And going. And the rain came harder, and harder, and harder…I never knew water could fall out of the sky with so much force! And the hail kept coming–the few hail storms I’m seen in SoCal have last 2-3 minutes…I swear it went on for 45 minutes yesterday. It just would not stop–and then, when you thought it might be done, it would come down harder, and the hail would be larger.
There are no words sufficient to describe this–photos will tell the story.
This is not far from my classroom–I’m one hallway over to the right. That’s standing water–a LOT of it–with hail floating in it.
A haildrift…we had these everywhere from where the hail poured off the overhangs. Some of them were over 18" deep–and some were still there this morning.
This is what it looked like–a big white blur. That’s my classroom door open there on the left–I’m probably in front of the door, not that you can tell. I neglected to mention the thunder–the big red cell was right on top of us, so thunder and lightning were simultaneous. The power was knocked out for a few minutes, frying the phone system, computer system, and even the intercoms were honked up (and still are). The computer lab my 5th period students had been in had a partial roof collapse (we’re talking the ceiling tiles, insulation, etc. coming down); at least six of the 30 computers are completely ruined, and the rest likely are too. I hear the classroom adjoining it was hit worse–she had 3" of standing water in it *this morning. *
View of the icy lake that formed between the office (visible) and library. ALL grassy areas looked like this.
Compare this with the first pic–even MORE hail has accumulated in the haildrifts.
Normal dismissal time is 2:35pm; teachers were instructed to keep kids until told otherwise (which of course is hard to communicate when 2 of the 3 systems are knocked out, and the 3rd is damaged). We didn’t let them go until 3:05pm, and it was STILL raining hard then. Several kids today came with soaked homework–I obviously gave everyone a free pass on it.
The scary thing is, the roads looked about like this. A lot of the streetlights were knocked out. Cars coming to school had a thick layer of hail on them (my truck bed had quite a bit). I was in NO hurry to leave. Thankfully, though it rained hard at my son’s preschool, it wasn’t crazy like this…so RuffLlama was fine, and DeathLlama was able to pick him up.
It’s still cold and rainy today, amazingly. Our high temperature today was about 40 degrees lower than Monday’s.
Seriously, seriously bizarre weather.
Wow. And…NEAT! 