stephbg | Hail from hell

tl;dr On Thursday 18th October 2014 at roughly 4pm Sector 7 was struck by an extreme hailstorm which destroyed our patio roof and caused some water damage to the ceiling. Also apologies for timey wimey vagueness and possible cruelty to tenses. Spoons have not been in good supply lately.

The Bureau of Meteorology had promised some wild weather for Perth that day, but we sit in a corridor that somehow often gets missed by the most interesting weather. The Great Hailstorm of 2010 bypassed us completely – it fell to the north, south, east and west but missed us. Yesterday's weather didn't miss.

This is what the storm didn't miss – our front patio.

When I heard a distant rumble of thunder (confirmed after careful listening that it wasn't traffic, a plane, or neighbourhood power tool usage) I checked the weather radar and saw several intense storm cells, coloured deep into the red on the rain scale. One of them was still a fair distance north of us, but close enough to account for the thunder. I like thunder, so I was happy when it started to get louder. The sky started to look interesting and all I could think about was louder thunder, yay!

May you live in interesting times.

Now it could be my imagination, but it looks like there's a bit of rotation happening up there.

Hmmm, looks like I won't be getting that CSI Photograph Enhancer job any time soon.

At some point I became aware of a roaring sound. It was a bit like wind through thick trees, but there was almost no wind. It might have been a plane flying low, perhaps trying to avoid the weather, but the pitch didn't vary. I went outside again and looked up and out to the north east, joining a couple of other neighbours who'd also come out to stare at the sky. My next best guess was that we could hear the sound of heavy rain, but the noise just kept going on and getting louder and louder with nothing to explain it. I didn't give hail a thought. Later one of the neighbours said the sound lasted for four minutes, and by golly it was *weird*.

Eventually the rain came, and we scattered for cover. But the rain was nothing much, just a light flurry coming in from the east. And then the west. And then it danced around for a while. Hmmm, I thought, that doesn't look good. Then the hail started – jagged pieces of ice tore down with incredible force. They weren't large, but they bounced and although I was several metres under cover I got hit by a couple of ricochets before I retreated behind the safety mesh front door. I noticed a small hole in the patio roof and thought it was annoying, but not worth repairing.

And then it really kicked off. I shut the main door and clung to a bit of internal wall that allowed me to see out of the kitchen window, but would offer protection if the glass went. When it storms I've usually got my nose pressed up against the glass, but this one I gave some distance to. The roar was incredible; one neighbour who also lost a patio roof described it sounding like an AK-47 (and I suspect she actually knows what that sounds like – details at 6). I could see the pond and the poor fish took a bit of a pounding – most of the floating duckweed was splashed out and replaced by shredded bits of garden.

Somewhere in there the hail turned to rain, but the gutters and drains were clogged with ice and debris. Water starting to run down some of the walls inside the front door, and water ran from the light fitting. Collected a couple of litres coming from there in a bowl, deployed a saucepan under another drip, and put down newspaper here and there to mop up other spills.

When it stopped I discovered the ruins of the patio roof and an incredible amount of hail lying around, some of it in drifts up to 20cm deep. The reason for the internal leak was soon apparent – a large drift of ice had gathered in the roof valley immediately above.

Some of the ice blocking my roof.

Some more ice blocking my roof. There's a patch of damp ceiling right underneath the worst of this on the right hand side.

It was quite Christmassy, if you ignore the season, the hemisphere, the damage, the fear, and pretty much everything else. I doubt (I hope) I'll ever see such a thing again.

The Sector 7 front yard. At least the hail squashed the weeds as well.

Piles of ice hung around for hours.

The individual hailstones weren't huge, and the biggest I found was only about 20mm in diameter, but they were really interesting shapes. I'm used to hailstorms coming in sweltering heat which melts any hail pretty quickly into smooth round balls and then it goes. After this storm the temperature dropped like a brick (I prepared myself to outrun the freeze down a corridor) and the hail hung around for hours. I wasn't together enough at that point to take pictures, but some of the shapes were really interesting, like chunky snowflakes. The body was roundish, but covered in sharp flat crystalline planes, and some had spikes and shards sticking out of the main body.

I tweeted a picture of the patio roof and it go retweeted a few times, but on Sunday morning I was rather surprised to find a Channel 9 news crew on my front doorstep. I was happy to let them take footage and chat, but I declined to be interviewed on camera (to be frank it was all about my appearance – yes I am that shallow. And puffy and pale.). I sent them next door and they got several minutes' worth out of them. It was quite fun to watch the cameraman duck and crouch trying to get interesting shots of a static object. In the end they went with a loving pan from the debris on the ground, up our bins and to the roof above. Sadly in the news report they described it as a backyard patio so it looks like you can't trust the media after all.

When I went to the shops on Sunday torn leaves were everywhere, but most noticeable on the street and in the shopping centre carpark, but some streets between my house and the shops looked quite clear. Picky things, storms.

Greenwood Village carpark the day after the storm.

Since the house was secure and seemed dry (and I was frankly dithery) I didn't try to get in touch with the insurance company straight away. The patio roof damage was clear but I wasn't sure how to handle the potential ceiling damage – was it something that would dry by itself, or was action required? I'm grateful I'm not at all familiar with the insurance claims process, but I wasn't sure if I could add water damage to the claim later if and when it turned up. I wanted to talk to a human, but my insurer keeps office hours. In the end I submitted an online claim on Sunday and just described all the damage, knowing that there would be a human involved at some point. The online claim process was not without difficulty – for one, my policy number didn't fit in their form so I sacrificed a leading zero (apparently there's an extra 1 they didn't need). I gave them the advertised four business hours to call me then chased them to clear up any problems. My claim was in, so I was told to expect a call.

Here I'm getting a bit fuzzy about the timing of things. If you're reading this it means I didn't go back to Facebook to check on the records I kept there at the time.

A call came the next day, telling me to expect another call from the assessor in a day or two. Half a day later I got the call from the assessor to say he'd be there the next day. By now the discolouration in the ceiling and especially under the eaves had started to show up so I was easier with the idea of showing the assessor where the water had gone.

About this point I got a gutter cleaning firm in to clean and inspect the guttering and roof. They found a couple of shifted tiles in the roof valley where the biggest drift was, and put them back. There was plenty of storm debris up there, but nothing to indicate that we were negligent, so that was good. I'm pleased to report that my ridge capping is officially "perfect" :-)

The insurance assessor came and he was a lovely bloke, called in from the country to handle some of the flood (sorry) of storm claims. I think it was storm + 5 or 6 days at that point. Much to my surprise he said he would expect the insurers would pay to paint the whole ceiling in the affected areas, so there wouldn't be an obvious edge. For once the house design works for us, as this means we might get quite a lot of ceiling painted as we'd been meaning to for years. And given that there were damaged areas under the eaves on three sides of the house, he said we'd get the whole lot redone. We've only had that new paint for six months or so, so it was sad to see it bubble and go yellow. Nice to know it will be back to new again. There was no question that the patio roof would be replaced!

And now I'm waiting for a call from the builders mid to late this week. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the claim had come together so far, but now the pace slows a bit which isn't too much of a problem. Somewhere in the process we'll get a visit from an electrician to check the affected light fittings, but in the meantime we're doing without them.

So that's where things stand. Looks like the carpet that got wet has dried out properly with no hint of mould. The ceilings weren't damaged enough to need replacing, and we can live without a few lights and external roofing for a while.

It's nice to know that those hideously enormous insurance fees were actually doing something useful.