Severe storms that crashed across Colorado’s Front Range on Wednesday brought ping pong ball-size hail, rain, gusty winds and five tornadoes that created havoc with airline schedules and some roads, but caused few lasting problems.

Streets in Colorado Springs and parts of the Denver area flooded when hail clogged drain grates, and plows were dispatched after vehicles got stuck in several inches of hail that fell near Denver International Airport.

CLICK HERE for a slideshow of Wednesday’s storm.

The bad weather had been forecast all day for northern Colorado and stretched from early afternoon into the evening. Tornado sirens sounded in Denver and Aurora shortly before 3 p.m., and three twisters were reported in Aurora, the Denver Post reported. Tornadoes also were reported in Watkins, south of DIA, and near Byers, which is southeast of DIA.

DIA reported flight delays of up to 90 minutes and diverted 38 flights, some to Colorado Springs and some to Grand Junction. It also diverted 24 flights on Tuesday because of severe storms.

Frontier Airlines reported that it canceled 13 flights because of damage to its aircraft.

In Castle Rock, a micro burst ripped a piece of metal from the roof of the recreation center, according to a news release. No one inside was injured, and firefighters said the building was structurally sound. Officials said the facility would reopen Thursday.

The severe weather warnings weren’t extended to the Pikes Peak region until mid-afternoon, and then the storm hit with a bang.

Will Stoller-Lee said the storm appeared to come from “out of the blue,” and within minutes, inches of hail  — speckled with shreds of green leaves it stripped from trees — covered the roads in downtown Colorado Springs.

“This is bad,” said Stoller-Lee, who watched the storm from a window seat inside a Starbucks on Tejon Street, south of Pikes Peak Avenue. “That tree right there was looking pretty good; not anymore.”

The quick-moving storm went north, dropping rain and hail as it went. At the Air Force Academy, winds of up to 55 mph were reported.

It missed the Waldo Canyon burn scar, but localized flooding was reported in Black Forest, where last summer’s fire has denuded some areas. The rain is “coming down in buckets,” said Diana Apodaca of Crosses for Losses. “First we had hail, and now rain, thunder and lightning.

“Our parking lot is a lake,” she said of the store at the corner of Shoup and Black Forest roads.

Colorado Springs police officers in the Falcon patrol division battled poor visibility while responding  to home burglar alarms set off by wind and hail beating against the glass.

A water main break at southbound Nevada and Motor Way also contributed to the soggy road mess that came with the storm, police said.

But for El Paso County, it was mostly over in about an hour, leaving residents to assess the damage from the inch of hail reported in several areas, including Colorado Springs, Monument, Woodland Park and Calhan.

Angela Thorpe, a spokeswoman in Greeley for State Farm, Colorado’s largest auto and home insurer, said the company began receiving claims from Wednesday’s storm in Colorado Springs within an hour. The company recommends that policyholders check their homes and vehicles for damage, take photos of the damage, make temporary repairs, if possible, and contact their agent or the company by phone or online to start a claim.

Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association in Greenwood Village, said the storm was “widespread, hitting all the way from Denver to Colorado Springs.”

“It, along with the storms that hit Denver and the Eastern Plains yesterday, are the first big severe weather event of the season,” Walker said. “We are still in a wait-and-see mode on insured losses.”

She said claims from Tuesday’s storms in the Denver area were coming in slowly.

“The extent of the insured damage won’t be known for either storm for 24 to 48 hours after people start filing claims,” Walker said.

A couple of short-lived powers outages from Wednesday’s storm affected about 7,000 people, and there were reports of some broken windows near downtown Colorado Springs, including at the Colorado College campus. The CC facilities team received numerous calls of building flooding and broken windows, according to an email send to students, staff and faculty.

Hail blanketed southwestern Colorado Springs, and patches of it remained into the evening near The Broadmoor, where an estimated 9,000 people are attending the annual Space Symposium and were between scheduled events when the battering hail began.

“It was pretty amazing. An awful lot of us got caught in the middle of it,” said Don Kidd, who serves on the Military Affairs Council for the Colorado Springs Regional Business Alliance.

“I think it’s clear nobody freaked out,” said Elliot Pulham, executive director of the Space Foundation, which hosts the symposium.

The Broadmoor hotel came through the storm unscathed, although there was minor damage to the resort’s greenhouse along Cheyenne Mountain Boulevard, said communications director Allison Scott.

“The damage is being assessed,” she said, “but it is relatively minor.” A large delivery of plants Wednesday had been safely tucked into the greenhouse before the storm hit.

The hail stripped trees of their leaves and knocked pine needles off evergreens across southwest Colorado Springs. Shortly after the storm passed, Kelly Mundell shoveled hail from his porch, and the air smelled like fresh-cut pine.

Having grown up in Security, he remembered bad hailstorms hitting the Pikes Peak region.

“But I don’t remember getting out the snow shovel to shovel it off the sidewalk,” said Mundell, who lives in the 600 block of West Cheyenne Road.

But Peggy Perales, with the National Weather Service in Pueblo, said the storm wasn’t particularly unusual.

“This is our standard springtime weather,” said Perales. “Golf ball sized hail for that long is not as common, but it’s not out of the norm, either.”

And more is possible this week, with a forecast of scattered thunderstorms along the Front Range into the weekend. The forecast calls for a 40 percent chance of severe thunderstorms Thursday in the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, with a 50 percent chance in Colorado Springs Thursday night. Denver has a 60 percent chance of heavy rain on Friday.