The 15th was a snooze. The 16th was hail — 82 of the day's 92 reports were hailstones, and they fell in two clusters a thousand miles apart.
The monster came out of south-central Kansas: a 4-inch stone at Cullison — grapefruit-grade ice that punches clean through shingles, dents car hoods, and turns skylights into a bad memory. If you're anywhere near Pratt County, pull up the Kansas map, find your town, and assume you've got damage until a roofer says otherwise. Oklahoma caught the tail of the same setup with 2.75" near Laverne.
The bigger cluster by sheer volume sat up in the Midwest. Michigan logged more reports than any other state — 35 of them — topped by a 2-inch stone near Vandalia, while Indiana and Illinois filled in the corridor (1.75" at Ogden). Quick yardstick: under an inch mostly just makes noise, an inch-plus starts bruising shingles, and 1.5" is where claims get written. Plenty of that corridor cleared the bar.
Wind barely showed up — ten reports the whole day, the strongest a 71 mph gust out in Montana. This one was about ice, not air.
Wherever a core rolled over you, the play is the same: don't wait it out. Hail rarely leaks the same week — it surfaces months down the road, after the claim window has started closing. Ten minutes on a ladder now beats a mystery stain come winter.
Contractors, the two routes worth the gas are the Kansas hail belt and the Michigan–Indiana corridor. For the season-long board on where the big stones keep landing, the Top States for Hail guide stays current. Want to check your own county? It's all in the state-by-state breakdown below.