A flash of severe weather dumped nickel- and dime-sized chunks of ice on parts of Eugene Sunday evening for approximately 30 minutes. Several streets and campus buildings flooded, and minor damage and power shortages were reported.
No injuries were reported to DPS or the Eugene Police Department as of 8 p.m. Sunday.
The thunderstorm was caused by an unusually unstable air mass that covered most of Oregon, but the flash of hail was reported only in Eugene, said Ira Kosovitz, a forecaster at the National Weather Service.
Eleven campus buildings reported losing power briefly, and people in Willamette and Lawrence halls reported flooding, said Shawn Traxler, Department of Public Safety dispatcher. Several inches of water flowed into parts of Allen Hall’s lowest level.
Numerous tree branches fell during the storm, and a tree toppled at Westmoreland, Traxler said.
A sink at the Knight Library exploded with brown goo, Traxler said.
University student Lucas Posada was walking with a friend when the storm broke, and they ducked under the University Bookstore overhang for cover, he said.
“The water was just like pouring off the roofs of buildings … you can’t even throw buckets as hard as it was going,” Posada said. “It was literally raining buckets, literally.”
The storm formed when cold air moving swiftly at high elevations trapped warmer surface air and caused the warm air to rise rapidly, Kosovitz said. Hail and rain formed in the process, and the storm moved northward from southeast Eugene at approximately 25 mph, Kosovitz said.
Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. the temperature dropped nearly 15 degrees, and air pressure rose at a rate almost three times as fast as other points during the day, according to data from the University’s weather station.
The majority of the day’s rain, about one-third of an inch, fell during that roughly half-hour period, according to the data.
University graduate student Jen Bildersee was walking home from the Willamette Valley Folk Festival, which had just ended, when the storm hit, she said.
“I was with a couple friends coming over the Autzen foot bridge,” Bildersee said. “We hid behind a construction board because the hail was huge and it hurt.
“It was coming down, so people were hiding under bridges,” she said. “Everyone who was out kind of ducked for cover and abandoned their bikes.
“There was a softball game going on at the field, so the whole softball team was hiding under the bridge,” Bildersee said. “It was wild. I’ve never seen weather like this in Eugene.
“It came in really like a wall. We could see it coming when we were crossing the bridge and you could see, it was really clear to either side, to east and west, and then we looked toward campus and it was just this wall of gray. It moved really fast.”
After the storm, a low-hanging mist and puddles of melting hail covered campus. The unstable air will be replaced by a marine air mass overnight, and rain is forecast, but no severe thunderstorms are expected, Kosovitz said.
News editor Jared Paben contributed to this report