Believe It Or Not: This Is What Four Feet Of Hail Look Like
After four feet of hail fell from the sky over Amarillo, Texas, yesterday, the local National Weather Service office posted a photo on Facebook to show folks what something like that looks like.
But many on the social networking site weren't buying it. "It's a lite dusting of hail on some damn rocks," said one angry skeptic. A weather service spokeswoman was called in to confirm. "I can assure you we do not have big rocks like that in West Texas," Krissy Scotten told MSNBC.com.
The photo, Scotten said, shows a Potter County Fire Department firefighter standing in the aftermath of a slow-moving hail and rain storm that left four feet of ice in its wake. "It was actually the rain/water that caused the drifts," she added. "Anytime you have hail accumulate 2 to 4 feet high and get over three inches of rain, no matter how it occurs, it's pretty incredible."
She pinned the blame for the ice's rock-like appearance on drought. "We're very dusty around here," she said.
The Amarillo weather service doesn't keep hail amount records, so it was unclear how the storm stacked up against similar systems from years past, but chief forecaster Jose Garcia remembers "five to 6 feet deep hail" falling in Dalhart, Texas, back in 1993.
