Just as people start bringing out their shorts for the start of summer, one Texas town had to reach for something rarely seen in late May: a snowplough.

Parts of the state saw a dramatic 50F temperature drop on Wednesday thanks to a giant dump of hail, some “DVD-sized”. The storm made western Texas look, briefly, like a winter wonderland.

Temperatures in Marathon, a town in the south-west region of the state, went from 105F (40.5C) to the mid-50s in just an hour, residents of the town reported.

“It was like an air conditioner,” Brian Curran, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Midland, Texas, told ABC News.

The last dramatic drop in temperature in the state was recorded in February 2022 in Austin, when the temperature dropped from 88F (31C) to 32F (0C) in 24 hours, the largest rapid drop in the state’s history.

The temperature rapidly decreased as hailstorms bombarded parts of west Texas with chunks of ice as big as 5in across.

In Marathon, road crews had to bring out snowploughs to clear out about 2ft of hail that had accumulated on the town’s main street.

One reporter for the Washington Post in Lubbock, Texas said he encountered hailstones “larger than grapefruits”.

On social media, Texans reported hail crashing through the roof of a local Walmart in north Texas. Another posted a clip of baseball-sized hailstones crashing down on to a road, cracking the windshields on some cars. Similar baseball-sized hailstones were also reported last week in Texas as storms started to bulldoze through the state.

The dramatic hailstorms arrived in the state as the midsection of the country experiences extreme storms that have left at least 21 dead across several states in the region.

The storms arrived over the Memorial Day weekend and continued later into the week. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power in Texas, among other states. At one point, 800,000 customers in the state were without power due to the storms.

Source: theguardian.com