That was quite the five-minute storm Monday afternoon.
Began with darkened skies to the southwest and moved through Bay City.
It was the first time many of us had seen hail. Marble-sized, but hail nonetheless.
There’s a lot of things that storms bring – tornadoes, flooding, hail and high winds.
I wouldn’t pick which I fear the most. They all can be destructive in worst-case conditions.
But large-size hail is fearsome.
It’s loud, and it’s really destructive.
Hail size can be one of those eyes of the beholder.
Daily newspaper reporters used to spend lots of time on weather stories, especially if you worked on an afternoon paper.
You’d spend all of your time working on overnight storm rain counts – and flooding – so when the paper was printed shortly before noon, readers were learning what happened the night before and the morning after when damage could be ascertained.
Times change.
People go online to a virtual jungle of sites posting weather.
In those early weather reporting days, you had to be careful of what and who you talked to.
Hail was frequently wrong.
When I was an editor in Kerrville on an afternoon paper, time was moving fast toward the mid-day print deadline.
Yet the story about a store in Center Point reporting baseball-sized hail was interesting and it was unbelievable.
I called up the store the reporter had called earlier and asked about those baseball hail stones.
The store owner quickly put the hail stones in question at the size of golf balls.
Large enough to do plenty of damage to the exterior of the store, the guy told me, but not baseballs.
That would have been almost catastrophic.
I had words with the reporter.
He claimed he heard baseball.
The paper reporter nearly golf ball sized hail in that day’s edition.
The writer was a stringer and he was gone shortly after – the hail stone exaggeration was not the only stretch it seemed.
My biggest misstep in reporting weather was getting the wrong river connection in a Hill Country flooding story for the now-defunct San Antonio Light in the early 1980s.
It seems I got a river flood merging into the wrong river system.
While I’m from the Hill Country, I was unfamiliar with the rivers in the higher Edwards Plateau country.
I bought a map of the entire region that day.
I didn’t lose my job, but I learned the importance of care in handling news.
