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Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice
By Iliana Magra
The photographs that emerged from western Mexico on Sunday looked more like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie than an image of the last day of June: hills of white hailstones piled up on the streets, swallowing cars and blanketing the city in a jarring layer of ice.
The hail, which accumulated up to 3 feet high in some parts of Jalisco State on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, baffling the authorities who tried to find a way to clean up the icy mess.
Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco, wrote on Twitter that he had never seen anything like it.
“I witnessed scenes that I had never seen before: hail more than a meter high,” he tweeted, “and then we ask ourselves if climate change exists.”
He shared photos of excavators and plows working to clear the frosty debris from the roadway. But the local authorities couldn’t do it alone. The Mexican Army also assisted in the cities of Tlaquepaque and Guadalajara, two of the hardest-hit areas, according to Mr. Alfaro.
Despite the dramatic nature of the extreme weather event, no injuries were reported. But some homes were damaged, Mr. Alfaro said.
Experts say it is not unusual to have a hailstorm at this time of year in western Mexico, but the amount of hail was extreme.
Chris Westbrook, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in Britain, said the hail was a result of warm, moist air rising into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling to form heavy balls of ice before plunging back to earth. And mountainous regions like Guadalajara are ripe for this phenomenon.
“Fundamentally, hailstorms are not unusual in this part of the world,” he said in an email. “What is unusual is that the conditions were just right to get an awful lot in one go.”
Local residents did their best to navigate the unexpected ice-scape. Some clambered over the frosted mounds or walked their bikes through the piles of ice.
And children tried to make the most of the novelty of a city blanketed in ice in the middle of summer. One girl in a short-sleeved shirt lay down in a pile of hail in the middle of a street and tried to make a snow angel.
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