Maintenance crews worked on April 12 to clear roads after a storm dumped several inches of hail on parts of the Texas Panhandle, trapping motorists in muddy drifts that were waist-to-shoulder high.
The storm left so much hail in its wake that workers had to use snow plows to clear the piles from the road.
“It was crazy,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Justyn Jackson said about the strange storm, which hit in the afternoon on April 12. The hail was “real small” but there was a lot of it in a concentrated area, accumulating two- to four-feet deep, he said.
The rural area where the storm struck was mainly ranch land, about 25 miles north of Amarillo and south of Dumas. Rainwater gushed across the parched land, washing dirt and then mud into the hail, pushing it all onto U.S. 287, Potter County Sheriff Brian Thomas said.
“There were just piles of hail,” said Maribel Martinez with the Amarillo/Potter/Randall Office of Emergency Management. “Some of the cars were just buried in hail and people were trapped in their cars.”
Emergency crews also got several swift-water rescue calls as the road was flooded in low-lying areas, she said. Rural fences and vehicles suffered hail damage but there were no reported injuries.
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