Two days after a rare and violent spring storm struck one of Rock Hill’s poorest neighborhoods, nearly 1,000 residents swept up leaves, debris, and shattered glass blown out of vehicles by hailstones as large as golf balls.
With little warning, the storm changed a hot and sunny Saturday afternoon in the city into what Crawford Road resident Garrett Hinson said felt like an assault.
“It was just nonstop, for minutes on end, just getting bombarded,” Hinson said Monday afternoon. “It was almost like we were getting attacked by an enemy country.”
On Monday, Steve Wilkinson, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Greenville/Spartanburg office, said that the storm that stripped the siding from some houses, felled trees, toppled utility lines, and pummeled property in Rock Hill stretched as far as York at its zenith.
“Hail tearing off siding was the thing I have not seen a lot of,” he said. “I've seen lots of trees down, lots of wind damage, but just seeing torn-up siding was very rare; impressive in that sense.”
Rare indeed. Although a hailstorm with large stones hit the Charlotte region in 2011, Wilkinson said that a storm dropping such large chunks of ice on Rock Hill goes back further than most living memory.
The largest hail Wilkinson can confirm was close to three inches in diameter, blown by wind gusts around 60 to 70 – and in spots possibly as high as 90 – miles per hour. All of which, he said, is extremely rare for the Southeast.
“You might see it a little more frequently in Plains states, some of the larger hail,” he said, “but even there I think it's fairly rare.”
Also rare, he said, is the fact that huge hailstones were blown by such high winds in the first place. NWS categorized the storm as a microburst (not a tornado), which essentially is when a heavy, ice-filled storm system caves in on itself and the force of the storm throws heavy winds outward. But the winds that hit York County Saturday were uncommonly strong, enough to hurl large chunks of ice more sideways.
After the storm blew out, almost as quickly as it had arrived, melting hail that had covered streets, yards, and sidewalks, created an eerie mist that Hinson described from his front porch as something “that looked like the aftermath of a bomb attack. It just looked like smoke everywhere. As far as the eye could see, it was pretty insane.”
Hinson was one of the 930 residents of the city – most in the historically Black neighborhood immediately surrounding Crawford Road, where Clinton College sits – still lacking power at noon Monday. By the time this article was published, there were about 850 residents still without power in Rock Hill, according to the city.
Hinson said he works from home and has been unable since Saturday. Meanwhile, Hinson’s neighbors raked leaf litter so dense it blotted out the sidewalks in some spots along Crawford Road.
A few doors down from Hinson, the Parks family cleaned up debris, including pieces of the rear window of their car, which had been draped with a plastic tarp. Octavius Parks said the storm pummeled his house after coming out of seemingly nowhere.
“It was like it hit the hood and left,” Parks said. Rock Hill sounds a siren when storms look like they could become tornadic. While Wilkinson said the NWS did have severe storm warnings out as the system made its way down from Cleveland County, North Carolina, the warnings were about 10 to 15 minutes ahead of the storm; but the siren never sounded. Wilkinson said not all residents who receive alerts for tornadoes or storms via phone apps got the warning, because they are not subscribed for alerts for both.
As utility and repair crews worked throughout Monday, mainly in the Southside neighborhood surrounding Crawford Road, emergency management officials said that knowing the real scale of the damage caused by Saturday’s storm could take the rest of this year.
Chuck Haynes, emergency management coordinator for York County, said Monday, “I would assume … especially considering the public infrastructure, debris cleanup, trees, and that kind of stuff [costs could total] in the millions.”
Haynes said the County OEM hopes to have preliminary numbers on the reach and cost of the storm by the end of the week.
“But they're going to be round numbers,” he said. “It may be six, eight [months], maybe a year before we have an actual impact of the storm.”
