Brady Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in McCulloch County for over twenty years, and I can tell you Brady sits right in a bullseye for this kind of trouble. We’re smack in the middle of the Texas Hill Country, but we’re also on the western edge of that “Hail Alley” that runs up from San Antonio. The heat builds up all summer, and when those dry west winds collide with the moist Gulf air pushing up from the coast, the sky just explodes right over our heads. It’s not a gentle rain—it’s a straight-up cannonade of ice, sometimes the size of golf balls or bigger, coming down sideways at 60 miles an hour. And because we’re so flat and open, there’s nothing to break up that wind, so it just hammers the same side of your house over and over until the shingles are bruised and split.

The real kicker is the timing. Our worst storms don’t come in the spring like folks up north—they hit in late May and again in October, right when everyone’s letting their guard down. We’ll get a line of supercells that form right along the Edwards Plateau, and they’ll stall over the lake and just spin. I’ve seen roofs here that looked fine from the street, but when you get up there, the hail has knocked the granules off so bad the fiberglass mat is showing, and the wind has lifted the tabs just enough that a good gust will peel the whole thing back like a sardine can. The problem is, most folks don’t realize the damage until the next rain, and by then the decking’s already soaked. You’re not just fighting the weather—you’re fighting the fact that it happens so fast and so violently that a roof can go from “fine” to “done” in a single twenty-minute storm.