Sally Boughey was among the Barrington residents who were inundated with balls of ice over the weekend.
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Around 7pm on Saturday, February 9, Sally said the sky opened up and starting dumping enormous amounts of hailstones for about 20 minutes.
“We were outside just before the storm hit, the clouds above us were really dark and then heavy drops of rain started to fall,” Sally recalled. “Next minute the weather just turned wild. The hail just kept getting bigger and bigger and more and more of it kept falling.”
Sally said the sound of the hail hitting the tin roof was so loud she had to cover her ears.
“It was a mad rush to secure cars undercover, get the small animals undercover, and get back into the house to make sure windows weren't smashing,” she explained. “We were all just gob smacked, none of us had witnessed a hail storm of that scale before.”
When it was all over, Sally and her family went out to access the damage, noticing trees shredded of leaves and ice covering the ground, “as far as the eye could see.” Sally’s 13 year old daughter, Ella Howe snapped a few photos of the lawn awash with white.
“The cattle in the paddocks were just stunned and didn't move for some time after, they would have taken a beating from the size of the hail,” she said. “And a few poor galahs obviously knocked out of the trees, were on the ground not moving but thankfully after some time had passed, to our surprise, they shook it off and flew away.
“We were really lucky only having a little damage here and there, our neighbours were not as lucky, one having the solar panels smashed and guttering hanging down, another with garage doors left hanging and damage to their roof.”
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