What the hail?

Large size hail and storms that began Wednesday and lasted into the early hours Thursday, caused some damage and power outages across portions of the city and county, according to the National Weather Service and city officials.

NWS spokesperson, Orlando Bermudez, based out of the Austin/San Antonio office, said, “We had a couple of storms start to develop in the southwest portion of our area, the Rio Grand Plain,” Wednesday, adding that a southwest to northeast flow brought the storm across the I-35 corridor including San Marcos.

The NWS started issuing warnings late Wednesday and into the overnight hours, he said.

Large hail was reported across the region and the largest size reported in the storm swath was 4 inches, but 2-inch hail was reported in San Marcos.

The city and county experienced a brief break from the weather throughout Thursday, but the Weather Service said that for a three-hour period, from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday the area was likely to see the arrival of another line of storms, associated with a front with potentially hazardous conditions.

The main threat at press release was the possibility of more hail Thursday evening, followed by gusty winds heading into today. These strong winds had the potential to be between 40-and 50 mph, especially in the overnight hours Thursday which would affect the I-35 corridor and the city.

According to stormersite. com, there were 49 hail reports within the 10-mile of the center of the city during this storm cycle. The area reporting the highest amount of damaging hail was for the city zipcode of 78666 with 18 reports. The largest documented hail near San Marcos was 4 inches, about 16 years ago. As a result of the storm, city officials reported there were two outages related to downed utility power poles. This left some customers without power, as the SMTX Utilities crews worked to isolate and then repair the damaged poles.

For those experiencing power outages, the city provides live updates on its outage map at https:// www.sanmarcostx. gov/3703/Outage-Management- System.

The city’s Outage Management System was developed by Milsoft Utility Solutions, a Texas-based software development company “that specializes in utility safety and efficiency. In addition to giving customers more information about outages, the OMS is set up to notify SMTX Utilities crews of outage locations and potential problems. San Marcos utility customers may call 512-3938313 to check or report outages using the phone number associated with their Customer Connect account.