It's official. Last Tuesday's severe storms produced the largest hail ever recorded in Illinois.
Representatives from the South Carolina-based Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety traveled to Northern Illinois University to confirm the record.
They measured and created 3D models of several hailstones collected by Kankakee-area residents during the March 10 storm.
The Dorris family of Kankakee gave NIU meteorology professor Victor Gensini the record-setting hailstone after they saw photos of a slightly smaller stone collected by another local family, the Denaults. Gensini says conditions were right to keep the massive hailstones intact because many landed in mud. Some people told him that some of the giant hailstones were hard to find because they were half-buried.
The new record is nearly two inches bigger than the previous state record. That was a 4.75-inch hailstone that fell in Minooka in 2015.
For the record, the new largest Illinois hailstone — and maybe the largest ever reported east of the Mississippi — measures 168.05 millimeters at its widest point and 93.03 millimeters at its narrowest. It weighed 557.2 grams but had probably lost a little weight during the week between March 10, when it fell from the skies over Kankakee, and March 17, when scientists took their calipers, scale and scanner to it.
Copy Edited by Eryn Lent
