Epic Denver Hail Storm Leaves Front Range Reeling. LOTS Of Damage Reported

A Denver area woman holds a giant hailstone Monday.

An epic hail storm swept along much of the Front Range in Colorado Monday, and the Denver metro area was among the areas hit hard. 

Big hail happens from time to time in the High Plains, but when it hits a metropolitan area, the total amount of damage can be worse than in a tornado.

The damage in any one area from hail is almost always less than tornadoes but the damage is more spread out, so the totals go up.

The Denver metro hail in some areas was the size of baseballs or even a little bigger.  There are dramatic videos to watch at the bottom of this post.

Countless cars were dented with windows smashed out. Thousands of homes and businesses had smashed windows, ruined siding and roofs that suddenly needed to be replaced.

One of the worst hit spots was the Colorado Mill mall, where hail smashed in skylights to let pouring rain in. Stores were flooded, the mall was evacuated, and shoppers leaving the mall found their cars with windows smashed out, says the Denver Post. 

If you're in Denver with a hail damaged car, good luck getting it fixed. The Denver Post says all the auto glass dealers now have full voice mails an overloaded email accounts from the torrent or people desperate to get their windshields fixed.

Hailstorms usually cause a lot of damage. The Denver Channel says Colorado's Front Range, including Denver, typically sees about $25 million in insurance claims from hail damage annually. This will be far worse, though damage estimates for this aren't in yet.

The most damaging hail storm in Colorado was in July, 1990, which caused $1.1 billion (with a "B" in damages. That figure is adjusted for inflation to 2015.

Watch this cool timelapse of the severe thunderstorm and hail taking over downtown Denver:



In this brief video, hail abruptly takes out the back window of a car:



Here's hail smashing through the windows of a Denver house:



And here's the chaos in Wheat Ridge, Colorado as house windows shatter and car alarms blare in the hail:

Springtime In Denver: Big Blizzard, As Usual

Wednesday's blizzard in Denver. Photo by Aaron
Ontiveroz, Denver Post.  

It was 70 degrees and beautiful around Denver Colorado on Tuesday.

However, anyone who even glimpsed at the news Wednesday saw it was a different story yesterday.

A blizzard pummeled the Denver area, and most of eastern Colorado for that matter, reducing visibility to zero for hours.

According to the Denver Post, the city's International Airport shut down. So did area Interstates and highways. Up to 190,000 lost electricity amid the heavy, wet snow and strong winds.

March and sometimes April are usually the snowiest months of the year in places like western South Dakota and the eastern halves of Wyoming and Colorado, so this snowstorm wasnt totally a fluke at all.

In the early spring, the weather pattern tends to shift toward one in which strong storms form to the lee of the southern Rockies and move out into the central and northern Plains. These are the storms that cause all those tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and South this time of year.

Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota are usually on the colder, northwestern flanks of these storms.

Very moist air comes up from the Gulf of Mexico, then gets caught up in the circulation of these storms. Low pressure systems spin counterclockwise, so the winds are from the east north of the storms.

 In places like eastern Colorado and Wyoming, these moist east winds are forced to rise, to follow the terrain, which also rises from east to west in this part of the country.  When air rises, it cools. Moisture condenses into raindrops, or if it's cold enough, snow flakes. Then you get these whopping spring snowstorms in Colorado and Wyoming, and in South Dakota's Black Hills.

The weather there is extremely variable this time of year, too. Hence the 70 degrees followed by the blizzard.

They do get a lot of snowstorms this time of year in places like Denver and Rapid City, but the snow tends to melt fast, too.

This particular storm is heading east, and has caused a lot of snow in a stripe through Nebraska, southeastern South Dakota, northern Iowa, southern Minnesota and on into Wisconsin and Michigan. 

Winter storm warnings are up for the northern tip of Maine, too, because of heavy snow and ice anticipated with this storm. Various freezing rain and winter weather advisories are up for central and northern New England because of this storm.

Here's some scenes from the blizzard Wednesday:

Hope You Didn't Fly Into Denver Today: Tornado And End Of The World Style Hail, Clouds

As you might have seen on the news, today was a chaotic day at Denver International Airport, and much of the rest of Denver  to say the least.

Hail accumulation Wednesday on Tower Road near
Denver International Airport. Photo by
Steve Nehf, Denver post.  

The busy airport and surrounding neighborhoods and towns got hit by a supercell thunderstorms that appeared ready to drop a tornado right on the runways or even terminal.  

At least five tornadoes did eventually touch down in the Denver areas, but reports so far indicate the twisters didn't cause much damage.

The real story with this supercell was the epic hail that hit parts of the metro area. There was so much cars got stuck in it, as if a blizzard had hit the area.

Possible rain wrapped tornado near
the Denver airport Wednesday.  

The tornadoes and huge hail storms continued on the high plains of Colorado and southern Wyoming into this evening.

Denver Police took this photo of
a hail buried street. 

Huge hail, severe thunderstorms, flooding and a tornado or two on Wednesday were also hitting parts of Ohio Valley and Midwest. It's pretty stormy across the nation today.
















Of course, some videos quickly emerged from the storm and made it to YouTube.

Here's a television reporter driving through the hail.




Here's the storm hitting a northeast Denver neighborhood



On some streets, hail accumulated so deeply, motorists got stranded. Here's a U.S. border patrol officer shoveling and helping a driver