‘Lost the back window!’ Watch as baseball-sized hail pummels storm chasers in Oklahoma

Dawson White
·2 min read

A storm chaser had a dangerously close encounter with a baseball-sized hailstone while pursuing a severe storm in Oklahoma last week.

Andrew Justin, a meteorology student at Oklahoma University, was chasing a storm near Chickasha on Friday when things started to get a little dicey.

Huge hailstones pelted his car, ultimately cracking his windshield and smashing through his back windshield.

He posted video of the incident to Twitter.

Warning: the video contains explicit language.

“Look at them, they’re baseballs!” someone is heard shouting in the video.

Large hailstones can be seen littered along the road and bouncing off the front of the car with loud thuds. The driver eventually pulls over just before the sound of shattering glass.

“The back window’s gone,” someone yells. “We just lost the back window!”

The camera pans to reveal a large hole in the car’s back window and shards of glass scattered inside the vehicle.

Footage from a dashboard camera captured the storm from another angle.

Justin later wrote on Twitter that most of the hail was the size of golf balls, but that “those isolated baseballs ended up destroying the rear window and nearly took out the windshield as well.”

The National Weather confirmed baseball-sized hail in the area.

Justin urged drivers to be vigilant when traveling during storms.

“Good safety tip — remember that even if most of the hail is small, there could be huge isolated hailstones,” he wrote. “Stay alert!”

Chickasha is just southwest of Oklahoma City.

A few days later, parts of Texas were met with a storm that produced some monster hail — grapefruit-sized stones that storm chaser Reed Timmer coined “gorilla hail,” McClatchy News reported.

More than three inches of hail accumulated outside Llano, roughly 75 miles north of Austin, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Read next:

‘Gorilla hail’ pounded parts of Texas. See photos and video from the powerful storm

Cat stuck in tree for 17 days survived hail storm before Arkansas rescue, owner says