Most days the hail all falls in the same neighborhood. The 8th couldn't decide. Of 70 reports, the two best hailstones landed a thousand miles apart — one out on the Nebraska plains where you'd expect it, and one in the North Carolina piedmont where you wouldn't.
Nebraska led the country with 15 reports and dropped the day's biggest stone, a 2-incher at Fullerton, though most of the state's tally was wind. The hardest gust came a little south and west — 78 mph at North La Junta, Colorado — inside a scattered run of Central Plains wind that also worked Kansas and Wyoming. Two-inch hail is the size that quietly earns claims: not the grapefruit ice that makes the news, just enough to crack a mat, dent soft metal, and strip granules where the roof takes the blow flush.
The real head-turner was east. North Carolina put up nine reports, eight of them hail, with a 1.75-inch stone near Olympia — an honest hail cluster in a state that usually measures its summer storms in wind and rain. Carolina roofs don't get the yearly hail conditioning that Plains roofs do, so a stone that size does more than its measurement suggests up there.
That's the trap in a day like this. Folks around Fullerton half-expect hail and know to look; folks around Olympia mostly don't, and an inch-and-three-quarter stone doesn't hit any softer for being a surprise. If it came down white and bouncing on your street, photograph whatever it dinged — cars, gutters, the AC fins — and date the pictures today. That timestamp is what turns a maybe into a claim when the leak shows up in October.
For the crews, there are two clean canvasses on this map and they don't overlap: the Fullerton pocket in central Nebraska, and that tight Olympia hail cluster in North Carolina that almost nobody working the Plains will think to drive. The rest is thin wind. Where the big ice keeps stacking for the season stays on the Top States for Hail board. Everything else is in the breakdown below — find your town and see which side of the 8th you landed on.