Powerful storms leave rivers of hail in Colorado

AccuWeather

One of multiple strong storms that tore through Colorado on Sept. 9 dumped heavy rain and hail in the town of Burlington, leaving behind dramatic scenes.

Transcript

00:00We're going to get to Tony Lawback here in the central U.S. He is in far eastern Colorado

00:04near the Kansas line, Kit Carson County right now, where he's tracking tonight's storm threat.

00:11Tony, what's going on out there? Yeah, Jeff, we were tracking a heck of a storm right now,

00:17you see behind me there. Notice, though, we talk about tornadic storms and we talk about

00:22high-base storms. High-base means that the base of this storm, you kind of see the white line

00:27of clouds there, which kind of signals where the base is. That is a rotating updraft, but it's very,

00:32very high off the ground. What that means is it makes it very difficult for any rotation

00:37to get down to the ground. What we are seeing kind of in lee of this here, you kind of see it over my

00:42shoulder, right over that hay bale, just right over there, some dust being kicked up on the forward

00:47flank of the storm. You see kind of the white curtains there as well. That is the hail, and when

00:51that hits the ground, you get outflow and you start to see that dust poke up. What did it look like

00:56under this storm about half an hour, 45 minutes ago? Well, check this out. We talked about Burlington,

01:01Colorado getting absolutely slammed with this storm. That severe storm left its mark for sure.

01:07We didn't see any much in the way of big hail. They were warned for golf ball size, but sometimes

01:11the radar has a hard time telling the difference between big, big hail and lots of it, and in this

01:16case, it was lots of hail. Now, still technically a severe storm. I did see quite a bit of stones that

01:21were about an inch in diameter, but it was the one to two to three inch deep hail that created some of

01:27the bigger problems. In addition, that storm parked over Burlington for quite some time. We saw flooded

01:33streets there as well, and even in some cases, rivers of hail. It was quite the sight there as that

01:38storm pretty much stayed over Burlington for about 45 minutes before it finally got some wheels and

01:43started to get moving a little bit to the south and east, but it left its mark for sure. Traffic on I-70

01:48was stopped for a while as hail was covering the interstate. Folks were stopped and pulled over,

01:53waiting for that to come through. Fortunately, again, we weren't talking about monster-sized hail,

01:58just a ton of it. Even some folks out and about with snow shovels clearing some of that hail off

02:03sidewalks and out of drainage ditches to allow some of those streets a chance to wind down and get some

02:09of that water and some of those rivers of hail off those streets there in Burlington and then again

02:14along I-70. Currently, right now, we'll come back live and we're continuing to watch this.

02:19This storm is moving down to the south and east, so this is crossing now into Kansas. I would say

02:25Sharon Springs, if you're in the Sharon Springs area, this storm is coming for you. Again, likely not a big

02:31tornado-producing storm, certainly not very tornadic at the moment despite some mid-level rotation.

02:37We're seeing lots of lightning, and again, you see those white streaks coming down. That is an indicative of hail,

02:43likely a lot of it. This storm currently worn for golf ball-sized hail. Whether or not that's how big

02:50the hail is getting or not remains to be seen, but again, what we saw in Burlington, it's a safe

02:54assumption to assume that even if it's not big, there's going to be a lot of it. So this storm is

02:59going to continue to work its way on off to the southeast. Again, folks in West Cannes, Sharon Springs

03:04along US-40, you're next in line to see this storm here over the next half hour or 45 minutes.

03:09Tony Lallaback, thanks for the update. A lot of good advice there.

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