RUMFORD — Western Maine’s first tornado warning of the season came and went Wednesday afternoon as severe thunderstorms pelted western and central Maine with hail and rain.

While there were no confirmed twisters, one woman in Kingfield reported baseball-sized hail from a storm at about 6 p.m., said Andy Pohl, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray.

“That was a monster storm,” Pohl said. “And that one had a better rotational signature than the (Oxford County) one.”

“I would not be at all surprised to find out tomorrow that there was some tornadic damage up there,” he said.

Pohl said the weather service issued tornado warnings ahead of that storm.

“I was the one who took the baseball-sized hail report, so that’s a firsthand report,” he said of the Kingfield storm. “The lady I was talking to said it broke out all of her skylights. She’s got a store and it ripped off all the awnings.”

Pohl said he grew up in Nebraska and has seen firsthand the damage that baseball-sized hail can inflict.

By early Wednesday evening, the weather service was still fielding secondhand reports of funnel clouds that people called in to their emergency management agencies, Pohl said.

“We don’t have any firsthand reports,” he said. “We’re getting quite a few secondhand reports and it looks like we’ll probably head out there tomorrow to do a damage survey to see what we can find.”

Pohl said John Jensenius, the weather service’s warning coordination meteorologist, would check those reports Thursday morning to confirm tornado sightings, touch downs or damage.

“On the radar, we did see good rotation,” Jensenius said earlier of the severe thunderstorm system that blew through Oxford and Androscoggin counties.

“Now, whether any of that made it to the ground is a whole different story,” he said. “At this point, we don’t have any reports that would indicate a tornado on the ground, but sometimes it takes a while for those to come in.”

The ingredients were there.

“The atmosphere was ripe for rotation in the storms and there was some good rotation,” Jensenius said.

The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch at 2:37 p.m. for Androscoggin, Cumberland, Oxford, Sagadahoc and York counties and eight counties in New Hampshire.

That meant weather conditions could spawn tornadoes. A warning means there is a significant risk of tornadoes.

At 2:43 p.m. in Rumford, a few gray tree frogs trilled from a grassy field at the River Valley Crossing mall lot off Route 2 as thunderheads blossomed overhead.

Then the sky quickly turned bluish gray and a few raindrops noisily spattered on windshields of cars parked at Marden’s. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Severe thunderstorms began pelting New Hampshire towns with hail measuring from an inch to 1.75 inches in diameter and felling a few trees.

Traveling at 45 mph, the system quickly moved into Maine, intensifying as it went, Jensenius said.

In Bethel, the sky turned dark, an official in the Town Office said by email.

That’s where the largest-diameter hail in Maine was first reported, at 1.75 inches, Jensenius said.

The thunderstorm broke over Rumford by 3:19 p.m., drenching streets as a few cloud-to-ground lightning bolts lit up darkening skies. And then it was gone, headed toward Canton.

At 3:13 p.m., the weather service upgraded its Oxford County watch to a tornado warning.

That meant meteorologists watching radar at 3:06 p.m. saw the rotation increase into a more intense rotation at the storm’s lowest elevation, Jensenius said.

“We’ve issued a number of tornado warnings this afternoon,” he said

The warning at 3:13 p.m. was for Bethel, Locke’s Mills, Bryant Pond, Rumford and Mexico.

“That was the general path of the storm we were watching,” Jensenius said.

At that point, the line of severe thunderstorms was 13 miles west of Canton and 11 miles east of Bethel and moving at 40 mph, he said.

Simultaneously, more severe thunderstorms were passing through northern Oxford and northern Franklin counties.

Clerks at Annie’s Market and Tranten’s General Store on Main Street in Kingfield said the sky got very dark and golf-ball-sized hail fell there.

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