Hail storm kills emu at Missouri zoo, cancels flights and damages hundreds of vehicles

Glass shards flew everywhere as Eric Gockel waited out one of the worst hail storms to hit Missouri.

One of the softball-size hunks of ice that hit the Springfield area on Tuesday measured 4.75 inches (12 centimeters). The hail killed an emu at the zoo, injured some drivers, knocked out power to thousands and damaged hundreds of vehicles and even some aircraft.

“I feel blessed that I came out unscathed,” Gockel, whose windshield was battered as he waited in his car along the side of a highway for the storm to pass, said Wednesday.

Severe spring weather is plaguing the South and Midwest, and emergency management officials said the hail storm was Springfield’s worst in history, although it falls short of a state record. Mark Burchfield, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Springfield, said that distinction goes to the 6-inch (15.2-centimeter) hail recorded in 2004 near the town of Maryville.

“It’s very rare,” he said of the Springfield storm. “This was a supercell thunderstorm that was able to really have a lot of wind shear with it and a lot of energy that allowed the hailstone to stay up aloft for a lot longer.”

At the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, staff tried to move animals inside, including Adam, a 21-year-old female emu. But an emu’s natural behavior is to lie down and take cover, spokesperson Joey Powell said in an email to The Associated Press.

Adam died from head trauma. And Oscar, a 17-year-old type of flightless bird called a rhea, was injured by the hail but was receiving pain medication and doing well Wednesday morning, as the zoo remained closed.

Some of the worst damage was recorded at the Springfield-Branson National Airport, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) northwest of the city center.

Dozens of flights were delayed or canceled, and hundreds of vehicles had windshields or sunroofs busted out, said Ren Luebbering, the airport public information officer.

Some passengers had to be bused around 100 miles (160 kilometers) away to the airport in Bentonville, Arkansas, because rental cars were damaged. Luebbering said airport staff spent three hours covering the most badly damaged vehicles with donated tarps.

“We think we put 300 or 400 tarps out there on cars,” Luebbering said. The airport warned online: “Expect damage to your vehicle.”

Nicolette Zangara, a spokesperson for the Springfield-Greene County Office of Emergency Management, said she had a bad feeling early on.

“You could just tell from what we were seeing on radar that the hail was growing in size,” Zangara said. “And then we started getting pictures from some of our neighboring counties, some of the hail that they were getting. And from that moment we knew it was going to be a bad storm.”

She said a few people called 911 to report being injured when the hail smashed their windshield, but she didn’t have exact numbers. She said the worst of the damage appears to be to vehicles. She said her car is so dented that it resembles the surface of a golf ball.

“It just seems like the last week of April is kind of cursed for our area,” she said, noting the area was hit hard a year ago by spring storms.

Ever since the hail hit, Gockel has been submitting insurance claims. The gutters on his house were “blown to smithereens” and a crew is headed out to evaluate how his roof held up.

He runs a pizza business and a food truck was damaged, along with work trucks and his teen daughter’s first car, which he bought her around a month ago.

Gockel is used to storm warnings. Normally, he responds to them by standing on the front porch and watching, rather than taking cover.

“Rarely does anything crazy come to fruition,” he said. “This is the first time that I really feel like the actual event lived up to the warning.”