Pellets pummel Mexican city in freak hailstorm
A storm dumped more than 4 feet of hail on parts of the Guadalajara area, damaging hundreds of homes and burying cars up to their windows in some places, Mexican officials said Monday.
The hellish hail inundated the country’s second-largest city, which has 5 million people. The Sunday storm clogged drainage systems, flooded parts of Guadalajara and filled the streets with ice, forcing Jalisco state to bring in heavy machinery Monday to help dig out residents and businesses.
“I’ve never seen such scenes in Guadalajara,” Jalisco state Governor Enrique Alfaro to Agence France-Presse, noting that it’s a wakeup call for climate change deniers. “Then we ask ourselves if climate change is real. These are never-beforeseen natural phenomena. It’s incredible.”
The deluge appeared to fill the streets in a matter of minutes, then rushed along in rivers throughout parts of the city, reported El Debate Noticias.
About 200 homes and businesses were damaged in the storm, according to AFP. Fifty or more vehicles were swept away in hilly areas, and some were buried under the ice chunks.
Hail can be part of a routine rainy season, especially in Mexico City. It’s formed when warm, moist air rises upward into high atmospheric altitudes while forming summer storms. If it rises high enough, BBC News explained, it hits below-freezing temperatures, and ice crystals form and become encased in more ice that forms pellets.
During especially severe thunderstorms, BBC News said, the pellets become heavy enough to plummet to Earth.
The official rainy season is generally through July, August and September, according to GDL Tours, a tourism company that keeps weather statistics. Temperatures this time of year generally top out at 83 degrees Fahrenheit, with lows of 55 degrees at night, and typical rainfall of 10.6 inches for the month. Total yearly rainfall is about 37 inches, GDL Tours said.
The storm happened along a boundary between two air masses extending south from the U.S.-Mexico border, CNN meteorologist Michael Guy said.
“Once these storms developed, all the ingredients came together for there to be this strange hailstorm over Guadalajara,” Guy told CNN. “This was a case where atmospheric and topographic ingredients came into play to cause a freakish hail storm.”