Severe storms drop hail
Damage, outages reported across state
Severe thunderstorms passed through Central Florida on Sunday, produced up to hen egg-size hail and caused the cancellation of outdoor COVID-19 vaccination and testing events in Orange County.
The National Weather Service in Melbourne said it received “numerous reports of quarter to golf ball-sized hail with this storm,” but Oviedo notably saw hailstones that were 2-inches in diameter — the size of a hen egg.
Videos and photos posted on social media from Orange and Seminole counties show various sizes of fallen hail in College Park, Winter Park, Casselberry and Winter Springs.
In Mount Dora, the fire department said it responded around 11:48 a.m. to a house fully engulfed after it was struck by lightning.
The owner of the home, in the 8000 block of Bridgeport Bay Circle, escaped unharmed and neighbors were evacuated as a precaution, the department said in a statement.
The weather also caused thousands of power outages in Central Florida. At its peak, Duke Energy reported about 4,000 outages around 1 p.m. in Orange and Osceola counties.
The largest number of outages occurred in Windermere and Pine Castle, according to an outage map.
Vaccinations were canceled on Sunday at the FEMA-supported site at Valencia College’s West Campus.
Denise Whitehead, spokeswoman for the Valencia site, said vaccinations will resume Monday of the single Johnson and Johnson shot or second doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Orange County canceled its free COVID19 drive-thru testing at Barnett Park on Sunday. The testing site will reopen on Monday.
In others parts of state, a 17-year-old girl was killed Sunday in Spring Hill, north of Tampa, when her car struck a downed power line, the Florida Highway Patrol said. The girl stopped and the car caught fire. She climbed out of the car and stepped on the power line, electrocuting her. Her name has not been released.
In Lakeland, a hotel’s roof sustained damage when it was partly ripped off by high winds. In Palm Harbor, north of Tampa, a bar’s roof was damaged by winds.
Sunday’s storms capped a weekend of damaging weather throughout the state.
A Saturday storm damaged about 20 homes on Florida’s Gulf Coast and injured one person, officials said.
Manatee County Public Safety said the homes were damaged by straightline winds Saturday afternoon and not a tornado, according to the Bradenton Herald. The wind’s strength was not immediately known.
Five homes sustained major roof damage and one person suffered minor injuries, the National Weather Service said.
Earlier Saturday, possible tornadoes caused damage in the Panhandle.
In Panama City Beach, a home and convenience store were leveled by a possible tornado, city officials said in a Facebook post. A resident’s photo posted by The Panama City News Herald shows the store’s roof and walls ripped away, but its counters, shelves and the merchandise they held appear untouched. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
In Pensacola, the roof of a downtown brewery was ripped off by the storm, local news reports show. The National Weather Service has not confirmed if that was caused by a tornado, but reported winds of up to 60 mph.