After the 1st kept it tidy in one Wisconsin county, July 2nd blew the day wide open again — 154 reports, and the Northern Plains took the brunt. The worst of it parked over one state, but the single biggest hailstone of the day flew off in another direction entirely. Two different kinds of bad, same afternoon.
South Dakota was the epicenter, and it wasn't close — 66 reports, more than the next three states combined. A gust hit 105 mph at Huron, four tornadoes touched down, and the hail ran up to 3 inches at Gann Valley. When one state logs triple-digit wind, near-softball hail, and tornadoes on the same afternoon, that's not a passing storm — that's a full working-over.
But the biggest stone anywhere in the country came down well east of that, in northeast Iowa: a 3.5-inch hailstone at Maynard, with a 2.75-incher landing the same minute a few hundred feet away — the swath above traces the core straight over town. Three and a half inches is grapefruit territory; it doesn't bruise a roof, it wrecks it, splitting shingles, caving gutters, and cracking windshields. Nebraska and North Dakota rounded out the 3-inch club, at Stratton and Belfield.
Here's a roofer's trick if a stone that size crossed your place: don't start on the roof, start on the soft stuff. Walk the gutters, the downspouts, the fins on the AC unit, the mailbox, the garage door. Those dent before shingle damage ever shows from the ground, and if they're dimpled, the roof took the same beating — time to get a real inspection on the books. Grapefruit hail means damage, full stop, so get it documented while the date still points cleanly at this storm.
For the crews, this one's spread wide but heavy the whole way — the South Dakota–Nebraska core, the Maynard pocket in northeast Iowa, and the Dakotas up top, all of it fresh and a lot of it 3-inch-plus. Where the season's big ice keeps stacking up is on the Top States for Hail board. Everybody else — run down the state-by-state table below and find the report closest to your address.