Brandon Copic was livestreaming from the eastern Colorado plains on September 20, 2026, when a supercell over Kiowa County dropped hail the National Weather Service would later confirm at baseball size, and the storm did not let up until a report nine miles south turned up stones even bigger
The sky over Kiowa County turned green before it turned violent. Storm chaser Brandon Copic had his camera rolling. His car sat parked in the open when the core of the cell rolled over him.
Within minutes, the windshield spidered. The hood dented in a dozen places. Copic kept streaming through it, narrating the damage as ice chunks bounced off the roof and piled up on the wipers.
Who was behind the camera
Copic runs a storm chasing channel built on long, unscripted livestreams from Tornado Alley. This one ran more than eight hours straight. He broadcasts free and asks viewers for tips through PayPal, Venmo and Cash App instead of charging for access.
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The archived stream had climbed past 256,000 views within a day of going up, based on the view count on YouTube. That made it one of his most-watched chases yet. Viewers kept replaying the minute the hail let loose on his car.
What the government’s own storm reports confirmed
The National Weather Service does not take a livestreamer’s word for hail size. It logs reports from trained spotters and the public instead. One came in at 5:04 p.m. local time, five miles north of Eads.
That report, filed to the Storm Prediction Center, measured hail at 2.75 inches, or baseball size. It matched what viewers watched crack across Copic’s hood in the stream.
An even bigger stone measured nine miles away
The Eads reading was not the biggest of the night. A separate report, backed by a photo of the stone next to a ruler, came from nine miles south of the town of Brandon.
That hailstone measured 3.10 inches, according to the same Storm Prediction Center log. It is large enough to dent a car roof on impact, closer to a small teacup than a baseball.
The warning that told drivers to get inside first
None of this arrived without notice. The National Weather Service office in Pueblo issued a severe thunderstorm warning around 5:42 p.m. local time, naming Eads, Sheridan Lake and Chivington directly.
The bulletin called for golf ball size hail and gusts up to 70 mph. It also told people to move their cars into a garage if they still had time.
What hail that size actually does to a car
Paintless dent repair shops rate hail damage in tiers, and a baseball-size stone sits near the top. It cracks glass, snaps side mirrors and leaves dents too deep to pull out with a suction tool.
A car left in the open through a storm like Copic’s does not get one hit like that. It gets dozens, spread across the hood, roof and trunk within minutes.
The bill nobody wants to open
Here’s where the story turns from weather into money. State Farm put the average payout for a hail-wrecked vehicle at roughly $5,000, based on its own claims data. Severe stones can push a single repair bill past $10,000.
That is real money against a comprehensive coverage premium that usually runs a few hundred dollars a year. It is exactly why insurers watch hail losses so closely every storm season.
The number behind every adjuster’s spreadsheet this year
Zoom out from one car and the total gets bigger fast. State Farm alone paid out more than $5.6 billion in hail claims across the country in 2025, the company said in a newsroom statement.
Texas led every state with $1.4 billion of that total. Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oklahoma also cracked the top five, so Colorado is far from the only ground getting hit this hard.
Why this stretch of Colorado keeps getting hit
Eastern Colorado sits inside what meteorologists call Hail Alley. It is the stretch of the High Plains where cold air aloft meets warm, moist air near the ground almost every summer afternoon.
That mix builds supercells fast. The same terrain that gives chasers a clear, flat horizon to film from also gives hailstones room to grow before gravity finally wins.
What happens to a car like this next
Copic’s vehicle is now a total loss candidate, once an adjuster tallies the dents, the glass and the paint. Insurers typically weigh repair cost against the car’s value before deciding whether to fix it or write a check.
For a working storm chaser, that decision matters more than usual. The car is also the gear, the shelter and the ride home from every future chase.
