Hail pummeled the Kansas City area Wednesday night as a storm front moved through the metro. Residents documented hailstones as big as tennis balls on social media and reported property damage, including broken windows.

Cathy Rocco of Shawnee retrieved a hailstone the size of her palm from her yard during the brief storm, she told The Star on Thursday morning. The storms brought strong winds through the city and prompted a severe thunderstorm warning from the National Weather Service.

The agency warned of “DESTRUCTIVE three inch size hail” and advised residents to shelter in a sturdy building away from windows.

“People and animals outdoors will be severely injured,” the National Weather Service wrote in an alert sent to many mobile phones in the area.

One local storm report submitted to the Weather Service on Wednesday cataloged a 3.5-inch hailstone near 55th and McCormick Streets in Shawnee. A 3.5-inch hailstone is about the size of a softball.

But Wednesday’s storms didn’t bring the biggest hailstones ever recorded in the Kansas City area.

That honor goes to a storm in September of 2010, which dropped hail measuring up to 5.5 inches in northern Jackson County. That’s slightly larger than the diameter of a CD or DVD.

Hailstones above 3 inches in diameter aren’t commonly seen in the Kansas City area, said Weather Service meteorologist Chris Bowman, who works in the agency’s Kansas City regional office.

“It’s a pretty rare event to get hail that size,” Bowman told The Star.

In the six-county Kansas City area, he found only eight reports of three-inch or bigger hailstones since data collection began in 1950, not including yesterday’s storm.

The Star’s Robert Cronkleton contributed reporting to this piece.

Do you have more questions about severe weather in the Kansas City area? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.