Authorities in a northeastern Colorado town needed to use heavy equipment and snow shovels to clear knee-deep ice that accumulated from a heavy hailstorm Monday night, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
Residents of Yuma, a town of 3,500 about 40 miles from the Nebraska border, had their car windshields shattered by baseball-sized hail that also pummeled buildings and broke windows, according to The AP.
City spokesperson Angie Cordell said there were no injuries reported but that the storm forced school closings while residents cleared fallen tree branches and the city used its front-end loader to remove ice accumulated from the hail, The AP reported. (RELATED: ‘Took A Shotgun And Blasted It’: Unimaginable Hail Storm Destroys Thousands Of Solar Panels In Texas)
Residents in Yuma, Colorado were cleaning up Tuesday after hail the size of baseballs and golf balls pounded the community, with heavy construction equipment and snow shovels used to clear ice that piled up knee-deep the night before.https://t.co/PbJR5IMpLv
— FOX21 News (@FOX21News) May 22, 2024
Curtis Glenn, a trustee at Yuma Methodist Church, told The AP that hailstones piled up in doorways overnight Monday, jamming doors and creating dams of ice that pushed rainwater into buildings.
Glenn added that some of the church’s stained-glass windows were shattered, forcing church members to move the altar, Bibles and hymnals to safer places, The AP reported.
Glenn, who said the hail left dents in his car “big enough to put a fist in,” equated the sounds of the hailstorm to “a gun going off while you’re on a train,” according to the outlet.
“It’s not something you ever want to see or ever want to see again,” Glenn said.
“It was tremendous. It was tremendous,” Keven Means, a local contractor and resident in Yuma, told Denver7. “All we’ve been doing today is patching windows. And looking at the damage and trying to keep everybody dry if it’s supposed to rain again tonight, somebody told me.”
The National Weather Service said that there were reports of some hail as large as softballs, up to 4 inches in diameter, near Yuma, but that most of the hail were the size of eggs, golf balls and baseballs, according to The AP.
