Up to 4 feet of ice buried all the territory between Dakota and Alaska — streets, that is.

In some ways, it was “gi-normous,” freakishly so. In other ways, it was microscopically small.

The hail that pounded the neighborhood between 10 and 11:30 p.m. Thursday turned a block of South Irving Street into a massive pile of fused and impassable hailstones that trapped a dozen cars. It required not just snowplows but a front-end tractor to dig it out Friday morning, filling more than 30 dump trucks.

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“We were scared. Oh, my God, it was so weird,” said Belen Gonzalez, 42, who lives at the corner of West Dakota Avenue and Irving. “We don’t understand why it happened only on this street. My husband said it was someone’s enormous prank.”

There’s actually a meteorologic term for what happened on Irving Street, just north of West Alaska Place: “plowable hail.”

The term was created following scientific studies about similar weather events around the country, said Cari Bowen, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Boulder.

“It’s a very interesting phenomenon,” Bowen said. “We saw the storm stall. It produced copious amounts of hail in one small area. It’s a meteorological thing.”

Lights were flickering on and off in homes on the south side of Dakota and north of Alaska, but not across the streets. A stream of icy rainwater ran down Dakota carrying away bags of trash. One person described sleeping in the basement at Dakota and Irving when a stream of hail and icy rain poured on him in a sudden torrent. Across the street, Antonia Lopez, 73, pointed to a screen that had been torn off her home the night before.

“I believe it was a tornado,” Lopez said in Spanish. “It was very strong. The house was shaking.”

Gonzalez said she also worried that it was a tornado. Looking out the windows, it was just black.

Austin Sierra, 11, said the hailstones were as big as “bumblebees. No, pingpong balls. We saw a bike. It was floating down the street.

“Trees were swaying. We couldn’t hear ourselves talking. Our cars were covered with leaves. It looked like they came out of a swamp.”

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or twitter.com/kirkmitchell