This is how it all began. We had just had a lovely Sunday afternoon at the Oklahoma Zoo when we saw that the weather was starting to change and it looked like rain. We decided to finish up and head across to Lake Hefner to grab a bite to eat for dinner.
About 10 minutes into our journey, this is what we saw, looming over OKC.
Literally, within a few minutes this thing was on top of us and we had to try to take shelter somewhere. Unfortunately, we had already passed the underpass you see in one of these pictures so we had to take refuge, as best we could, in a gas station.
Now this is where it starts to get serious. Just as we pulled partially under the over hang in the gas station the wind picked up to something very serious and hail the size of baseballs started falling and smashing the hell out of our car. At first it was all we could do to just sit there but when the front windscreen started to crack and bits of glass started blasting into the car it all of sudden became a situation that we really did not want to be in.
The boy was in the back of the car, we covered him up with coats, Deanna and both jumped in the back and covered the boy using our bodies. The noise was horendous!! You could literally feel the hail bashing the shit out of the car and window just kept on cracking and threatening to blow in on us.
I know I spend time joking about with regards to chasing storms but when you get yourself caught up in situations like this, it’s not funny. This kind of freak and sudden weather is usually, in most instances, followed by a tornado and we were just in the car, looking at each other as if to say “what the fuck is coming”
Being a photographer, I was not going to let this opportunity of documenting such an event go to waste and I managed to snap a few shots from inside the car as the hail was literally smashing it up.
