The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description | Hacker News Reader

The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description

washingtonpost.com

57 pointsortusdux63 comments

https://archive.ph/20240529204426/https://www.washingtonpost...

I wonder what this will do to car insurance costs. Sometime in the 90s we had monster hail in Munich and the damage to cars was in the billions. Years later you could still see cars that had tons of dents from that one day.

I imagine it's also ugly for unhoused people and homelessness has been on the rise for years. So you get beaned by a chunk of ice from the sky and now possibly have neurological issues on top of whatever else and may not see a doctor.

These storms build up over a period of time, I would imagine they would seek shelter under a tree or in a doorway as soon as one started up.

Feel bad for livestock though!

About 25 years ago (about this time of year) I was in Sydney, Australia - I was in a hostel and popped to the minibus to read their A2Z maps to look up a job I was heading to. I was a mild autumn day, maybe 16c.

As I got in the van I heard a clonk, and thought someone threw a stone at the van, then another, and another - suddenly sweeping down the street was a wall of huge hailstones as big as cricket balls - they fell for about 3 minutes then stopped.

You would have had a short time to run and hide - but if you were in a tent it would be horrible and potentially dangerous - equally if you were out somewhere open without cover.

The damage to roofs and cars was massive. I'm sure they gave some exception to driving with broken windscreens as so many were broken at one time, that loads of cars couldn't get theirs replaced.

Edit - realised their must be a Wikipedia article about it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Sydney_hailstorm

I remember this storm. I was living in Bundeena at the time. The damage to everyone’s cars was indeed huge. It’s a miracle more people weren’t killed.

Damn, I realize I was there too, I was living in Sydney at that time, but since I was renting I wasn't worried about damage to my own property. I remember my best friend telling me his dad's Saab had microdents and insurance got them a new Saab.

You'd have time to notice a storm of some sort was coming, but the actual hail often arrives quite suddenly.

Believe it or not HN comments dehumanizing homeless people come up so often that I started saving links to them about a year ago, and now I have a few dozens. This is probably the most literal example though. It's foul.

Your data set sounds interesting though I hesitate to suggest publishing it for various reasons. I upvoted you for having data. I imagine your comment won't fare well though.

I'll probably regret asking, but how is it dehumanizing? I said that as humans they would be able to find shelter, but an animal would not. Isn't that almost exactly the opposite of dehumanizing?

You dismissed the concern about homeless people instead redirecting to your empathy for farm animals.

A lot of humans are disabled, or are young children, or have a cognitive impairment, or are otherwise limited in their ability to act on a weather warning. Homeless people aren't an even slice of the population but all of these groups are represented.

It's "dehumanizing" to assume a human is capable of acting like a human?

And I think you have a rather low opinion of homeless people.

Yes, defining "human" in terms of capability that not everyone has is dehumanizing. Really is that simple.

I spent many years in and out of homelessness and still have deep ties to people out there. I have more respect for them than I do for most people around here frankly.

Exactly... Homeless people are smart enough to take cover, but animals don't necessarily know. Even if they do, they can find themselves far from any cover.

The animals on the farm I work at sometimes know a storm is coming and will find cover. My dogs know a storm is coming and want to play in it.

The hail in Munich I wrote about above started like a normal thunderstorm until suddenly all hell broke loose. I cant imagine homeless people will get enough warning to get away.

TBIs are real, and a TBI from a chunk that size going 60-100 mph can be lethal if not disabling.

Lubbock, in this one instance, has maybe ~700 unhoused individuals. It would be worse in cities like Austin where there are ~7000 unhoused individuals. (Note that most unhoused population censuses wildly undercount.)

Unhoused people have wildly varying afflictions or sometimes none at all of substances, mental health, motivation, encouragement, engagement, socialization problems, legal barriers, and lack of resources. There are a slim few sane, healthy, nonsmoker, nondrinkers, not completely destitute, but maybe elderly who through choice or life circumstances lack housing. And, there is a mental health crisis in America where people experiencing psychosis are especially vulnerable when they lack ID and cannot fill out MedicAid or Medicare SSDI forms.

TBI = "total brain injury" iirc from my insurance industry days.

Traumatic Brain Injury

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/8874-traumati...

Hail can kill people, but homeless people are almost always within reach of cover. In the types of conditions that hail develops, they are usually not standing out in the open. Almost nobody stands in the rain, much less hailstorms.

Not to mention any other animal more delicate than a sheep...

The NYT has a great podcast on this[1] -- insurers are refusing to insure geographic areas that are seeing a spike in weather like this. Not sure if this applies to car insurance, but home insurance is definitely changing.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/podcasts/the-daily/climat...

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/05/28/are-we-in-the-midst-o...

I didn't listen to the audio, but I know many insurers are pulling out of California. However, I think for CA, the bigger issues construction costs and regulations on how much they can charge.

The fires were definitely a huge loss, but there is a reason they can't just raise their rates to cover the risk

Insurance companies in California by law cannot use future predictions to set rates today. If they think there is a higher risk of fire losses in the future there's nothing they can do about it.

>If they think there is a higher risk of fire losses in the future there's nothing they can do about it.

They can stop issuing new insurance policies if they think they will be unprofitable. I also know a few people who have had their policy "accidentally" cancelled, and then they can not get a new one with that company.

Why not use shotput-sized? 4.33 to 5.12 inch diameter [0]

0. https://www.topendsports.com/resources/equipment/ball-size.h...

I would imagine that more people are familiar with the size of DVDs than shotputs.

As a telling piece of evidence, the header image in the article you linked doesn't even include one.

Should have gone with blu-rayn.

Can hail size be inferred from radar, or is ground truthing the only option at this time?

Can be radar indicated.

https://www.mesonet.org/images/site/Hail_Cheat_Sheet.pdf

https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/hail/detection/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2013.06.002

TLDR Dual-polarisation radar.

(Weather.gov digital weather products are solid, check them out)

At least it wasn't laserdisc sized.

http://archive.today/0TAMD

Lubbock just can't catch a break this season with fires, windstorms, tornados, and now megahydrometeors.

I'm along SE edge of the TX triangle where storms from roughly western, southern, or eastern jet stream flows run out of energy.

I find it fascinating that Texas and Florida, the states that get hit by intense weather are the ones building the most Housing.

Home and car insurers are having a field day in those states.

I don’t understand how “DVD” sized hail is different from “grapefruit” sized. A DVD is 120mm, or about 4 3/4 inches. A grapefruit is “ranges from 100 to 150 mm (4 to 6 inches) in diameter, its size depending upon the variety and upon growing conditions.” [0]

Also, the hail depicted in the image did not appear to be one hailstone but an accumulation of several.

0. https://www.britannica.com/plant/grapefruit

>Also, the hail depicted in the image did not appear to be one hailstone but an accumulation of several.

Concretions of hailstones in the air do occur which is how you can get to these larger diameters.

Something this large would have a difficult time forming any other way. The sheer weight of it would cause it to not stay aloft long enough to get to that size.

Also, does it matter how it was formed? A chunk of ice of that size falling from the ground causing damage doesn't care if it's a single round ice cube for a really large cocktail glass or if it made up of lots of smaller things frozen together as a single piece of ice. The object getting hit doesn't care of it's formation and makeup either. It's still going to hurt. Bad.

The size of a single hailstone indicates the number of times it was relofted and another layer added to it. This quantifies the storm in a way that an aggregate of smaller stones doesn’t.

Citing the dimensions of a grapefruit... Hackernews, never change

It’s different because the National Weather Service uses “grapefruit-sized” specifically to refer to hail that is more than 4.5 inches in diameter but no more than 5 inches in diameter. It isn’t “any hail that is about the size of a grapefruit”.

This hail was bigger than 5 inches, so NWS needed a new term for it per their estimation guidelines.

Better than Banana sized, I guess.

Using “DVD” doesn’t seem to make sense because, as noted, the diameter of a DVD is less than 5 inches.

Also children may not even know what a DVD is, so "new" is a reach. In 2034 it's going to be just like saying "8-track sized" in 2024.

next size up from grapefruit is pomelo I think, then maybe durian, or cantelope, then honeydew and watermelon

Next size up from grapefruit according to ISO is small red cabbage, then small green cabbage followed by cantaloupe.

As a weatherman, David Letterman once described hail stones from a storm as being "the size of canned hams".

In Texas we call those snowflakes.

"Everything's bigger in Texas."

Cue that Hillary Duff video...

https://youtu.be/lt6PVVr4B04?si=SVfSFzdJzdAWOUpc

I got caught in such a hail storm on a bright sunny day in Texas. Had to pull my vintage VW Beetle over and hold my hands on the windshield to hopefully keep it from imploding. Noisy too. Like being inside a snare drum. Over in about a minute...

"Texas snow"

Everything really IS bigger here! (but we've been saying that for awhile)

Climate is changing so much that is even affecting our language.

Vetrue.

The article made it seem like the difference is there was someone on the ground chasing the hail and documenting it, not that it had never occurred before.

I've been led to believe that if you legislate away any mention of "climate change", then it goes away... /s (But for real, if you live in Florida.)

This is far from record-sized hail, even for Texas. The article even says so. The headline is hype.

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>Forecasters warned of “DVD-size hail” as stones larger than grapefruits...

Not sure what "DVD-size" adds in this subtitle beyond the grapefruit reference, especially since a DVD is flat and the hail is not

The common grapefruit diameter is smaller than the diameter of a DVD. People like to reference the size people in the area might be more familiar. When you say grapefruit, I don't think of something the size of a DVD. That would be an extra large grapefruit based on the sizes and pricing of all of the stores that offer grapefruits I have ever seen. The DVD diameter sized citrus fruit I'm familiar would be pomelos, and not all stores carry them.

If you routinely see grapefruit with the same diameter as a DVD that it is a normal measurement for you then, that's great for you, but it is not the normal

They've used quarters as a reference point for forever, and coins are also flat, so I guess it's not a problem.

At risk of being a bit unempathetic, your comment seems a bit obtuse.

It’s pretty clear that it’s referring to the diameter of the hail. Other flat objects are commonly used to indicate diameter. Mostly coins.

The flat part wasn't confusing, was just quibbling about the odd over-explaining of the size (fwiw in the video the person says "baseball" and "softball", and indeed I didn't see any DVD-sized ones).

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