Hail Damages NorthPark, Shatters Skylights
Hail stones damaged dozens of skylights at NorthPark Center tonight, showering glass and water into the mall and sending maintenance crews into a flurry of activity.
At roughly 6:20 p.m., hail started slowly hitting the rooftop of the mall. Within minutes the noise of the stones cannoned off the walls, as visitors began taking pictures of the golf ball-sized ice chunks. Maintenance crews rushed from their usual posts to the lower level, where the stones penetrated the older skylights. By 6:45 p.m., nearly the entire original section of the mall was covered in a mixture of rain, melting hail, and broken glass.
Twenty minutes later, crews continued to clean — sporadically at best — the remainder of the mess, as mall-goers checked their vehicles outside for damage. One Park Cities People reporter got a few welts on his trunk and roof. Humph.
Isn’t it a good thing that there were no unattended juveniles in the mall at the time.
So odd that North Park got it that bad, yet just a few blocks away at our house we only got rain–no hail at all.
@Josh: They don’t call it The Bubble for nothing. And fortunately, ours is apparently thicker than the glass in NorthPark’s skylights.
(In all seriousness, the damage pattern was weird. Cars were damaged on SMU Boulevard in front of Twisted Root, but no hail at all on the SMU campus just across Central).