Last night, residents of Central Texas faced a sky brimming with trepidation as supercell thunderstorms pummeled the region, hurling hailstones the size of baseballs—and in some exceptional cases, as large as DVDs—across San Marcos and Johnson City. According to CBS Austin, the onslaught left tens of thousands without power and inflicted serious damage on the area.
San Marcos and adjacent areas were particularly hard-hit, as power outages surged to over 13,000 households after the storm. With the sun's rise on Friday, merely four customers reportedly remained without electricity, signaling a night of exhaustive repair efforts. The storm's ferocity was underlined by CBS Austin Meteorologist Avery Tomasco, who said it will "go down in the books as some of the largest to ever fall in the state of Texas."
Photos of the destruction surfaced across social media, displaying shattered vehicle windshields and structural damage to properties. The Hays County Sheriff's Office depicted the aftermath of hail's wrath on vehicles, while San Marcos officials reported downed trees and power lines that contributed to the civic disarray. Wielding significant velocity, the storm sent trees reeling near key intersections, with Streets and Cheatham and Hopkins and Bishop forming a litany of urban scars.
Unprecedented in scale, one hailstone in Blanco County was measured at a striking 6.25 inches, as per KXAN viewer reports, which is akin to dwarfing the largest iPhone. This measurement exceeds the National Weather Service's (NWS) current scale that caps at 5 inches, rendering the hailstone an outlier, one of the most colossal to have ever descended upon Texas.
The incidents of severe weather continue to mount, with expert storm chasers and meteorologists reporting sizable hail across the region. NWS acknowledged the existence of hail stones reaching 5 inches in diameter – dimensions more befitting of a digital storage disc than a product of nature. The images and videos barraging viewer submissions to KXAN paint a vivid tableau of the maelstrom's intensity and its chilling reminder of nature's unpredictable might. For Central Texas, the clean-up is just beginning, but the memory of this irascible sky will linger.
