Hail, Hail, the Hail's All Here

A little excitement last night for the Binghamton/Johnson City area.

This is the second night in a row for storms. On my exercise walk on the West Side of Binghamton this afternoon, we saw damage from downed trees and branches from last night's storms.

About 6:30, the rain started to come down with thunder. We were under a severe thunderstorm warning. We weren't under a tornado watch, unlike Thursday night.  My spouse, the amateur metereologist, was at the back door.  He never saw any hail sign. But suddenly we heard the thudding of hail on the roof.

Quarter sized hail came down, shredded most of our iris plants, decimated plants we bought at Home Depot yesterday to plant for my mother in law, did other damage to our home garden (and probably our car, but I haven't had the heart to check yet.)

This is "nothing" compared to some hail storms we used to get back in my Tornado Alley days, but was pretty impressive for upstate NY.

This storm (unlike the storm the night before last that came at 9:30 and the sirens going off had me scrambling, half asleep, to see if they were tornado sirens or fire department sirens) had the courtesy to come when it was still light.

Here are a couple of pictures of the hailstorms to give some perspective: this first one was taken during the storm (the hand is my husband's) so it is a bit blurry.

This picture was taken after the storm:

And finally (thank you, husband, for risking frostbite), one more.

In the next photo, the rectangular box is an Earthbox (with tomato seedlings in it) and the white stuff on the ground is also hail  It looks like marble chips on the ground, doesn't it?  This was taken during the storm.

Here is another perspective from right outside our front porch.  Again, the white stuff" is hail.   This was also taken during the storm.

I tried to take some "action photos" (I didn't have enough card space for video) but they really didn't come out that good.

I hope no one had a tree come down on their house.  And that no one got hurt from the storm.

(I'm also grateful that the storms have apparently subsided, at least temporarily, in the midwest.)