A year later, hail damage remains in Montour County

May 22--DANVILLE -- A year ago today, a freak hail storm pummeled Marietta Morris' roof and skylights with golf ball-sized chunks of ice as it blew across Montour County and left untold millions of dollars in damage in its wake.

Insurance companies, contractors and auto repair shops spent months working on claims following the storm, with one insurance agent saying that her company alone covered $9 million to $10 million in claims in the Danville area.

While much of the work has been completed, damage still lingers in some areas because of a backlog of insurance claims and contractor appointments.

Morris and her husband, Richard, had to invest about $23,000 in repairing their property at 3 Laurel Lane, Mahoning Township. The couple had just added a sun room to their house in December 2013 when the ice balls shattered several skylights, showering the room with glass shards. The storm also damaged the exterior of her house and a glass gazebo in her backyard.

Today, her house is more or less back to the way it was before.

"The roof is done, the siding is done, the skylights are in. That's the most important thing," Morris said.

Her son, Rich, helped her to hire contractors. The roof was the most recent repair, and a plastic outdoor storage container, riddled with holes from the hail, still needs to be replaced. Otherwise, it feels like home again.

Swartz's Ultimate Collision, on Montour Boulevard, is marking today's one-year anniversary of the storm by finishing its last hail-damaged vehicle. Swartz's fixed "in the neighborhood of several hundred" vehicles, making about $1 million worth of repairs, according to facility manager Ben Sitler.

Of the cars seen, about 100 were totaled, he estimated.

"We personally brought in about 70 to 80 (non-drivable) vehicles within that 48-hour period" after the storm, Sitler continued. On a normal day, the number is four or five. The largest single repair was about $18,000.

Jan Hendrickson, officer manager of Hawkins Collision Center, said the hail storm is a date that she and her staff will "never forget." She's been working at Hawkins for 37 years and has "never seen anything like that and I don't want to again."

"We haven't counted all our files, but we think we have around 700" repair claims, she said. A few more hail-related repairs are scheduled through July, with some individual damage totaling $15,000.

One insurance agent in Danville said the Pennsylvania parent company covered $9 million to $10 million in damage, across more than 900 hail-related claims.

"It was unreal"

Cindy Blake, an agent for Stetler Insurance, said she had just started her job in April at Stetler Insurance.

"I don't believe I ever filed more than two claims in one day" before the storm, but that day, she did 98 by herself and 97 the next day. "We worked until 9:30 p.m. the first night (Thursday) and 9:30 p.m. on Friday," she said. "I felt like I went to a college hazing. ... It was unreal."

She said Stetler filed 391 homeowner claims and 559 car claims related to the storm.

State Farm agent Jim Walls' staff was on vacation the day the storm hit, meaning he took about 150 phone calls in about three hours.

"I had to run from office to office to try and catch everybody," he recalled.

A State Farm memo at the time gave a rough estimate of 1,000 homeowner claims and 10,000 auto claims from the storm, though Walls wasn't certain how many of those claims went beyond the Danville area. Most of the damage he saw ranged between $15,000 and $25,000. The total damage in Danville was easily in excess of $1 million, though he wasn't sure by how much.

His own home, on North Crestwood, near the Strawberry Fields development, was damaged by the storm as well. He only recently had his roof and gutters repaired and is now working on the aluminum siding. Walls told his contractor to take care of other homes before working on his. Insurance companies "were just inundated" with claims following the storm, resulting in slower payouts to those affected.

Damage in Pa.: $153M-plus

Many insurance agencies with local branches were unable to provide exact figures on the number of properties damaged and financial damage sustained in the Danville area from the storm.

Dave Phillips, State Farm spokesman, said his company had 9,308 homeowner insurance claims and 12,560 auto claims reported statewide because of hail and wind damage from the storm, totaling about $153 million. Most of the claims were from the central to eastern part of Pennsylvania, though he did not know how many were from the Danville area.

Numerous hail contractors came to the area to set up shop and address damages. While many were legitimate, a few were accused of swindling residents out of money. A Northumberland area contractor, Michael Mummey, of Mike Mummey Construction, was charged with two counts of home improvement fraud in January after charging a Mahoning Township resident for more than $6,000 in repairs. Chadwick Reichenbach, an Orangeville contractor, had an arrest arrant issued for him earlier this month in relation to charging a Mahoning Township couple more than $16,000 for repairs and allegedly not completing them.

"It's something you can't rule out"

Alyson Hoegg, meteorologist for AccuWeather, said the storm was the result of a very strong cold front being pushed higher up into the Earth's atmosphere. At those higher altitudes, ice crystals and rain particles come together and can be drawn up even higher, gathering more and more liquid which then freezes into hail.

While the hail stones in Montour County last year were about 2 inches in size, Hoegg said, there are some hail storms in America's Great Plains region where the hail is 4 inches in size. Having hail the size of golf balls or tennis balls, as Danville had, "is not very common across the state."

Winds blew the storm across Pennsylvania, starting in the northwest and heading southeast, hitting the Muncy area and then Danville, before moving toward Pottstown and Reading. Based on the wind speed that day, the storm spent approximately 30 minutes in Danville, according to Hoegg.

"I don't think it's a high likelihood we see hail happening again (of that size), at least in the near future," Hoegg said, but "it's something you can't rule out."

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