Hail Mother Nature; ice leaves a mess

QUINQUE — Rain poured from the overhead lights and, with a crack of lightning, the phones went dead, but Philip Morris was not about to step a foot outside his office door.
“I’d never seen so much hail and it was falling horizontal because the wind was blowing so hard,” Morris said, standing outside of his metal-framed Ruckersville Powersports office. “It was wild. The hail stacked up on the metal roof and that backed up the rain until it was raining harder inside than out.”

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, if not a couple of million, was caused Monday by soaking rains, strong wind and more than an inch of hail as an isolated thunderstorm ravaged a narrow path from Stanardsville to Gordonsville.

The storm also brought with it lightning, but its most damaging component was an inch or more of hail that was blown nearly sideways by the storm’s winds.

The thunderstorm caused limited damage to buildings and homes, according to county emergency officials in Greene and Orange, but insurance officials in both counties say they spent most of Tuesday answering claim calls. Adjusters and agents directed calls to their regional corporate offices, but confirmed that hail damaged hundreds of cars, trailers and other property, turning some vehicles into “rolling totals.”

Mary Beth Cramer, of State Farm Insurance, said damage reports and claims were flowing into the Charlottesville regional office after Monday’s storms. She did not have numbers available as claims were still being investigated.

“We have a lot of reports coming in from across the Mid-Atlantic region, especially in West Virginia,” she said. “It’s been a very busy spring between lightning and floods and tornadoes touching down.”

Monday’s storm lasted about 10 minutes at Morris’s place in Quinque, but its effects will be felt for weeks, and maybe months, to come. The heavy hail hammered more than two-dozen aluminum horse trailers and cargo trailers, dimpling and pimpling their surfaces as if BBs were shot from a lawnmower and destroying nearly 50 plastic air vents.

“We have 27 trailers and there isn’t a trailer that wasn’t damaged,” Morris said. “I’ve never seen a storm anything like it. We were just sitting there thinking it was going to rain and then the hail started.”

Storms affected much of Central Virginia, but the severe winds and hail were limited to a narrow swath that cut from Quinque to U.S. 29 north of U.S. 33 and on into Orange County.

When the storm hit, employees of Blue Ridge Trailers took cover in a subterranean repair pit over which a large horse trailer sat.

“We couldn’t close the doors on the [repair facility] because the trailer was too long and every time you’d look out of the pit the hail would hit you in the face and it hurt,” said
Donna Martin, co-owner of the company. “The wind blew so hard the hail fell sideways.”
Both Morris and Martin said at least an inch of hail fell. Both properties had small piles of hail remaining even 24 hours later. Both are waiting to hear from insurance companies on the future of their inventory.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Morris admitted. “The last time we had a lot of hail damage the insurance company paid to replace the [aluminum] skin of the trailers. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“We’ve had our insurance agent looking at everything and I don’t know what we’re going to do because we’ve got about $900,000 worth of inventory and it’s about all damaged,” Martin said. “I guess we’ll have to have a ’hail of a scratch-and-dent sale.’”