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Hail is a shower of precipitation in the form of irregular pellets or balls of ice more
than 5 mm in diameter. Usually they consist of small, harmless clumps of packed ice, but
they can also destroy crops, kill people and animals, and bury towns under inches of
snow. One of the worst hailstorms ever recorded occurred in Bangladesh on April 14,
1986. 2.25-pound stones showered the town, leaving ninety-two people dead. An even worse
case occurred in 1359, near Chartres, France. As Edward III of England was preparing his
army to attack the French, a violent storm unleashed a shower of hail overhead. The
oversized stones killed 6,000 horses and 1,000 troops. Not even the armor that men wore
was enough to protect from the blows. On March 28, 1867, hailstones the size of coconuts
plummeted a region near Bellary, India. In one town, 2,470 sheep, eight cattle, and two
men were killed. Leaves were stripped off trees and clothes torn off people’s backs. One
hundred years later in China, hailstones weighing as much as twelve pounds hit areas
north of Beijing and killed flocks of sheep. On April 4, 1977, a storm caught a DC-9
airplane, forcing it to crash-land near New Hope, Georgia, taking sixty-eight lives.
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