Altair Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight—Altair gets hammered in a way folks from other parts of Texas just don’t expect. We sit right in that sweet spot between the Gulf and the Hill Country, so when those spring squall lines roll in off the coast, they don’t break up over the trees like they do further north. Instead, they tighten up and spin, and we get these narrow, violent cells that drop hail the size of golf balls or bigger, usually right between March and June. The geography doesn’t help either—all that open, flat farmland means there’s nothing to slow the wind down. A straight-line gust can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour across a mile of bare dirt, and that’s when you see shingles just peeled back like sardine cans.

And it’s not just the spring. We get those late-summer pop-up thunderstorms that seem to come out of nowhere, usually around August and September, when the heat’s been baking all day. Those are the sneaky ones—no warning, just a black wall of clouds, and then it’s over in fifteen minutes. But in that short window, the wind can change direction twice, lifting the edges of your roof deck and letting rain drive in sideways under the underlayment. I’ve seen brand new architectural shingles with granule loss that looks like someone took a sandblaster to them, all because of one of those quick hits. The real kicker is that most folks here think they’re safe because they’re not in “Tornado Alley,” but we get just as much damage from straight-line winds and hail that’s dense enough to bruise the plywood. If your roof is older than ten years, those storms are going to find the weak spots—guaranteed.