The thunderstorms that brought heavy rains to the area last week also brought damaging lightning and hail.

Localized hail ruined most of a blueberry crop on fields off the Kingdom Road in Blue Hill on Thursday, August 7, and lightning strikes resulted in damage to homes and businesses and caused spotty power outages in the area.

Several growers lost almost all their blueberry crop to the hail. Jeff and Trude Beardsworth had already started raking their leased field when the storm hit, and Trude Beardsworth estimated that they lost more than a third of the crop.

“There was still a good batch of berries there,” she said. “Some of the best raking was still left.”

The hail pounded the berries, which had been shaping up to be a fairly good crop, and knocked most of them off the plants. Beardsworth said the next morning there was pea-sized hail still left on the ground. That chilled the remaining berries enough so they dropped off as well, she said.

Lloyd Turner had just moved his equipment onto the field that day in preparation to start harvesting the crop on Friday.

“We had just strung it off that day and were ready to rake,” Turner said. “We lost 100 percent.”

Some of the growers, like Turner, did not have insurance to cover the lost berries.

“We insured that field, and insured it for years, and nothing ever happened,” he said. “This year, we didn’t insure it.”

Turner estimated that the six Kingdom Road blueberry fields that were hit by the hail lost about a quarter of a million pounds of blueberries. Although the price paid for berries has not yet been set, there’s no doubt that the loss of that many berries is significant.

That loss represents income that helps to cover the costs of raising the berries including burning, spraying, as well as the cost to the landowner, who also feels the effect of the lost berries.

“That’s no income for him, and he pays the taxes for the lands,” Turner said. “This hurts a lot of people—the grower, the landowner, the rakers—everybody gets hit by this.”

Everybody, including the processing plant.

Most of the growers in that area provide berries to G.M. Allen & Son in Orland who also owns fields that were damaged by the hail. The damage to the berries on those fields was a significant loss to the company, according to Vice President Annie Allen.

“Altogether, there was a loss of about 90 percent of the crop on over 100 acres of fields,” she said. “That’s pretty devastating. It’s a pretty big setback for us.”

It’s also a fairly rare setback. Allen’s father has been in the blueberry business for decades, and according to her, he’s only seen damage from hail once before in all those years, and it never caused the kind of damage this storm caused.

The damage seems to have been localized with hail falling in South Penobscot and Blue Hill, generally between County Road (Route 177) in Penobscot and the Kingdom Road in Blue Hill.

There were reports of hail built up an inch thick on the ground in some areas of South Penobscot, thick enough to cover the grass.

According to Allen, there was some evidence that hail had hit near Pertville in Sedgwick where they saw some dropped berries and some damage to a vegetable garden, but nothing as serious as the damage to the Kingdom Road fields.

Allen noted that the hail damage appeared to be restricted to just that one area of blueberry fields. A nearby blueberry field, located just across the Kingdom Road, did not receive any hail damage at all, she said.

Source - http://castinepatriot.com/