Blackwell Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over twenty years, and I can tell you that Blackwell doesn’t get lucky when it comes to springtime weather. We sit right in that nasty corridor where the dry, hot air from the west slams into the moist Gulf moisture rolling up from the southeast. That collision is a recipe for supercell thunderstorms, and those are the ones that drop hail the size of golf balls or bigger. It’s not just the size, either—the wind that comes with these storms is what really does the damage. We’ll get straight-line gusts of sixty or seventy miles an hour that peel back shingles like they’re nothing, and if the hail has already bruised up the asphalt, that wind will finish the job and expose your decking to the next rain.

And it’s not a once-in-a-while thing. Our storm season really gets going in April and can stretch all the way into June, but I’ve seen rogue hail events pop up in September and even October when the temperatures swing hard. The geography here doesn’t help us, either. We’re on that flat, open prairie with hardly any tree lines or hills to break up the wind, so a storm cell can roll through here at forty miles an hour and just sit on top of a neighborhood, hammering it for twenty minutes straight. I’ve walked houses on the same street where one side looks like a meteor shower hit it and the other side barely has a scratch—it’s that random, but the risk is always there. If you’ve got a roof that’s older than ten years, you’re basically playing roulette every time the sky turns green.