Eight hail reports in Virginia on the 26th, and half of them landed in one county. Louisa County caught the meat of it — a 2-inch stone at Fredericks Hall and 1.75-inchers at Bumpass, Louisa, and Chilesburg, all within a few miles of each other — with smaller hail scattered out toward Lake Caroline, Richardsville, and Farmville.
That's the second time in under a week this stretch of the Piedmont has turned up here. A 2.25-inch stone hit Doswell, just up the road, on the 21st. Two real hail days that close together in the same country is unusual for central Virginia, and it means some of those roofs have now been worked over twice inside six days.
Outside that pocket there wasn't much ice anywhere. Minnesota dropped an inch-and-a-quarter stone at Iron Junction up on the Iron Range and an inch beside it, and Illinois logged a lone inch at Albion. The rest of the 28 was wind — a run of gusts through Wyoming's Powder River Basin around Wright and Gillette, a couple on Minnesota's North Shore — none of it the sort of thing that fills a schedule.
Small storms like this are the ones that cost people a claim. When the whole event fits inside one county there's no news coverage, no neighborhood chatter, no truck parked on every corner reminding you to go look. The damage still happened and the storm is still in the record — it just never announces itself. If you live between Louisa and Fredericks Hall, write the date down somewhere you'll find it, because when the shingles start shedding a year or two from now, proving when it happened is the whole ballgame.
Anybody working Virginia has an easy corridor here: a few miles across, 1.75-to-2-inch stones, and freshly hit twice. How the year's hail actually ranks state by state is on the Top States for Hail board. The full table sits below — check your state's row, then zoom the map down to your own crossroads.