Storm causes damage

A brief hail storm Sunday afternoon damaged auto paint jobs and roofs but seemed to spare shrubs.

Tom Lovelace, owner of Lovelace Roofing, said he had about five times the usual number of calls on Monday morning.

"If we usually get five calls in the morning, we got 25 this morning. That was from insurance adjusters and homeowners," he said.

Even though homeowners were concerned about possible damage, he has not found much damage yet, Lovelace said.

"I don't think it hailed very long. But the big golf-ball hail, some people said, only lasted less than a minute," Lovelace said. "Roofing is kind of like a piece of sandpaper. (The hail) needs to beat on it and knock those gravels off."

Ann Cushman of Cushman Paint and Body said business was heavy on Monday. "We're not even letting our adjusters go to lunch today. We're ordering lunch in," she said.

As of early Monday afternoon, Cushman said, "we've written about 50 estimates today since 7:30 this morning."

She said the volume of work, although heavy, was not as heavy as the 1991 hail storm. "It's not quite as bad as that. ... We were probably a little busier then."

But the dents caused by the more recent storm are on average larger than the dents caused by the 1991 storm, she said. "This is big. It's not the little pingy dings that we saw in '91. This is big."

Betty Lewis at Greenbrier Nursery said the plants at the business escaped damage from the hail.

"We didn't have any (damage)," she said. "We were extremely fortunate, because we could have had a mess."