7News.com.au, by Tracey Ferrier: Giant hailstones have punched holes in roofs and left fist-sized holes in car windscreens after violent storms hit central Queensland.
Rockhampton local Garrett Wells took some eye-popping photos of the ice chunks that plummeted to the ground at his home at Berserker on Sunday.
“There were softball-sized chunks of ice bouncing off the road,” he told AAP on Monday.
“The one next to the Coke can, that’s just what was left of it. It was bigger than that.”
Wells, who helps run community Facebook group CQ Flood Update, says Sunday’s storm kind of crept up on locals, who are used to wild weather.
“It didn’t have that whole big build up, it didn’t look green,” he said.
“Next thing, there were these massive things smashing the roof and you’re like ‘Oh I hope that wasn’t a solar panel.’”
Wells said his home had emerged relatively unscathed but some cars looked like they’d been shot up, and there are reports of at least one injury.
“A fellow over on the southside of Rocky got hit in the head by one. It split him open quite badly.
“If it was like the ones we got, it would have nearly knocked him out.”
The Bureau of Meteorology said super-cell storms on Sunday dumped oversized hail in parts of the Capricornia and Central coast regions, including Rockhampton and nearby Yeppoon.
“Giant hail—eight to 10cm in diameter,” forecaster Kimba Wong told AAP on Monday.
“That’s like tennis-ball or even baseball-sized, with some even slightly larger ones as well.”
Almost 80 calls for help were made on Sunday, mostly for structural damage in the Rockhampton area.
“The calls were about damaged skylights, roof damage, from the hail,” a spokeswoman for Queensland Emergency Services said.
“Three quarters of the jobs were for structural damage, the rest for flooding, trees down, things like that.”
The upper atmospheric trough that spawned the wild weather has since moved offshore and more sedate conditions are forecast.
Our Comment:
These hailstones foreshadow the hail which will be poured out on the earth during the seven last plagues.
Prophetic Link:
“And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.” Revelation 16:21.