Mystery 12-pound ice chunk crashes through roof of Wisconsin home
A western Wisconsin home has a massive hole in it after a mammoth chunk of ice crashed through the roof on Tuesday.
The 12.6 pound ice chunk crashed through the roof of Ken Millermon's home in Elk Mound, a town of just over 1,000 residents located about 80 miles east of Minneapolis on Interstate 94.
Millermon tells Bring Me The News that the ice ball weighed 10.9 pounds as a single piece, but 12.9 pounds with all of its fragment added to the scale. One of the fragments grazed his head.
Luckily, Millermon said the main piece of ice missed him by about 6 inches. He had just gotten out of the shower and was about to go online to check his finances when the ice ball crashed into his home. He said he didn't know what had happened and was in shock right away.
"Yes I was in shock. I was covered in insulation. Sounded like a bomb going off in my room and looked like it too," he said.
Considering the chunk of ice is so large that it would obliterate the national record for largest hailstone, the most likely answer for where it came from is an airplane. In fact, Millermon says he's been told by "many" that it likely came from a plane.
"We were told by a Chicago news person that TSA said a Delta flight flew over at the same time it happened heading to MSP," Millermon said.
Millermon sent BMTN a handful of photos showing a huge hole in his roof, and debris and ice chunks on the floor and a bed.
The largest hailstone on record in the United States was recorded in Vivian, South Dakota, on July 23, 2010, at 8 inches in diameter. That beastly hailstone in central South Dakota was 18.625 inches in circumference and weighed 1.9375 pounds.
In other words, the biggest piece of hail ever recorded in the U.S. was only 15% the size of the iceberg that crash through the roof of Millermon's home.