Hail in Denver knocks planes out of service
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, June 20, 2001
By Nick Wadhams
Associated Press
DENVER – Some 1,500 travelers were stranded at Denver International Airport today after golf ball-size hail knocked nearly 40 planes out of service.
“The sound in the concourse was incredible,” said Louanne Smith, a teacher from Maryland who slept at the airport with her son and husband after Wednesday night’s storm. “It was like thousands of drums.”
By this morning, United Airlines had canceled 125 of its nearly 2,300 daily flights – a quarter of them due to the problems in Denver, one of its biggest hubs.
United spokesman Chris Brathwaite said at least 32 planes were damaged in the storm, and the problem would cause delays at other airports. Frontier Airlines reported damage to four planes.
The storm brought tornadoes to the area, then swept south, shattering windows in Watkins, about 20 miles east of Denver. Two people suffered minor injuries and 1,200 customers lost power. In some cases, hailstones punched through the metal sheathing of mobile homes.
At the airport, Gayle Baehr of Columbus, Ohio, and her 7-year-old son Chris were on a plane that had pulled away from the gate when she saw the hail start to fall.
“They just looked like enormous golf balls, and they put these huge dents in the wing,” she said. “You could tell it caused a lot of damage.”
Their flight never took off. Airport workers folded blankets and stacked pillows given to passengers who slept on cots, benches and floors overnight.
Airport crews towed 33 cars with missing windshields and other hail damage to an impound lot for safety, airport spokesman Steve Snyder said. In all, more than 83 cars, police cars and maintenance vehicles were damaged.
In Kiowa, about 40 miles southeast of Denver, customers of the County Seat Saloon took shelter in the basement when the storm hit.
“It got really cold and you could see water sucked up off the street like there was a tornado,” waitress Maryann Sidebottom said. “We were doing karaoke and couldn’t hear the siren. Someone came off the street to tell us.”
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