It’s official. Last Tuesday’s severe storms produced the largest hail ever recorded in Illinois.
Representatives from the South Carolina-based Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety traveled to Northern Illinois University to confirm the record.
They measured and created 3-D models of several hailstones collected by Kankakee-area residents during the March 10th storm.
The Dorris family of Kankakee gave NIU meteorology professor Victor Gensini the record-setting hailstone -- after they saw photos of a slightly smaller stone collected by another local family, the Denaults. Gensini says conditions were right to keep the massive hailstones intact because many landed in mud. Some people told him some of the giant hailstones were hard to find because they were half-buried.
The new record is nearly two inches bigger than the previous state record. That was a 4.75 inch hailstone that fell in Minooka in 2015.
