CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A team from Chester County is in the storm zone, but they are not storm chasing. They are collecting data that could potentially change how we build our cars, homes, and other buildings.
While hailstones are the smallest part of the storm, they are mighty and costly. In fact, from 2018 to 2020, more than two and a half million insurance claims were filed from hailstone damage alone.
This is step one in learning how to build stronger infrastructure that can withstand severe storms.
The first big storm system of the season is ripping across the south.
Spawning tornadoes, dumping copious amounts of rain. While vicious winds can uproot life and property, severe storms often drop damaging hailstones.
“It always sounds like a train. It gets this big roaring that really hurts your ears. And it sounds like a whistle right on you, and you better make it before the whistle hits.”
Strong winds destroyed homes, uprooted trees, flipped trucks, but there’s one threat that made these storms severe - hailstones.
Dr. Ian Giammanco with a team from the Insurance Institute of Business and Home Safety is in the thick of these storms. They are riding it from Texas to the Carolina’s.
“We still don’t understand what those nuisances are to one better forecast hail, so one we could think about being able to protect our cars if we had a really good hail forecast. We could really take a dent out of that damage,” Giammanco said.
While hailstones are often not the headline, they account for significant damage.
Whether we’re just measuring or weighing hailstones, we’re actually doing tests on them to crush them to see how much force it takes to fracture them for essentially better building material,” Giammanco said.