The further north I drove, the blacker the sky got. It was raining when I arrived at the barn but wasn't too bad so we went on with lessons (luckily my first lesson only had one rider). Before long it started to hail so we moved our vehicles under cover of the barn's lean-to.
We rode for a little bit longer before we started to hear a "Thunk-Thunk" sound on the roof of the arena. I was a bit worried that the skylights might break so I called the rider over to the side of the arena and got her to hop off. We took a peek out the door to see MASSIVE hail stones hitting the ground and bouncing 10' back into the air.
Then the hail got even bigger and we look up to see pieces of it smashing through not only the skylights of the arena but the roof too! We quickly hurried for the lounge area which is more sheltered and brought the horse in with us. Luckily Lizzy is a good girl and didn't mind being in an odd place like that.
A tornado touched down only a few miles away so I think we were very lucky. It was definitely a bit scary!
Anyways, on to the photos!
This is how big the hail was. Literally tennis ball sized.
You can see all the holes in the roof of the arena.
And the pieces of roof & skylight all over the arena.
O.M.G.
ReplyDeleteIs it weird that me first thought was "how's her garden"?
~SmartAlex
Pretty incredible damage; what a pain to repair.
ReplyDeleteThose little shards could have caused some serious injury.
My first thought was, "I wonder how much suture it would take to sew up a potential laceration from it?"
haha Luckily we didn't get this storm at home, it was pretty localized, so my garden was safe! I had prepared by trying to bring in what I could and cover everything else.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a plastic material the sunlights are made of, not sure if they'd cut you or not but definitely wasn't about to sit around and find out!