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PIEDMONT | Keith Ness was remarkably pragmatic for someone whose place of employment suffered millions of dollars in losses from Friday’s hail storm.
“It’s Mother Nature. You can’t do nothing about it,” said Ness, as he and other Jack’s Campers employees assessed extensive damage to about 500 travel trailers and motorhomes on Jack’s soggy lot Saturday morning.
Hailstones ranging from quarter-size to the size of grapefruit cut a swath of destruction from eastern Wyoming across the Black Hills late Friday afternoon. The Rapid City National Weather Service office said reports included 1.75-inch diameter hail at Provo in Fall River County to 4.5-inch cannonballs five miles northeast of Newell in Butte County.
The Piedmont-Tilford area of Meade County also caught the brunt of the storm with 2- to 3-inch diameter hail.
Ness saw the sky darken as the storm zeroed in from the west just after 5 p.m. At first, it looked as if worst of it might veer to the north, he said. The downpour started with heavy rain driven by winds in excess of 50 mph. The first hail to hit was little more than pea-sized. “Then holy shmoly, it got bigger fast,” he said. “The wind was the worst part. It was bad.”
The storm continued its fury for another 10 to 15 minutes, leaving row after row of aluminum-sided RVs as if ravaged by gangs of hammer-wielding vandals. Windows were smashed and the ground was littered with pieces of trim and light lens covers.
Fiberglass panels and some tempered glass windows appeared to have fared better in the onslaught, but Ness figured every trailer or motorhome on the outdoor lot had suffered significant damage.
Shattered windows on the west side of the dealership’s main building had been boarded up with plywood Saturday morning while Ness and other employees scrambled to replace broken roof vent covers and cover cracked RV windows with tape and plastic sheeting.
“We’ll just try to seal everything up today and keep the moisture out,” he said.
Ness estimated about half of the inventory was new, with the remainder pre-owned or customer-owned units in for repair. Many will likely be a total loss, he said.
“You just see what the insurance company does, I guess,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”
On nearby Interstate 90, an estimated two dozen cars and trucks had windshields smashed and side and rear windows shattered. Westbound traffic in the aftermath of the storm slowed to a crawl as wrecker crews and law enforcement officers helped clean up the carnage. County snowplows were deployed to help clear roadways of ice.
Elsewhere in and around Tilford and Piedmont, there were reports of cattle injured by hail with hayfields, verdant with plentiful recent rainfall, flattened by the storm.
Ness said he is accustomed to the Northern Plains summer scourge of hail storms.
“I grew up in South Dakota, so I know what it is like,” he said.
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