Caddo Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing in this county for over twenty years, and I can tell you Caddo gets hit harder than folks realize. We sit right in that corridor where the dry, hot air from the west slams into the humid Gulf moisture rolling up from the south, and that collision is a recipe for supercell storms. It’s not just the spring tornado season either—we get those violent, pop-up thunderstorms in late May and again in October that seem to come out of nowhere. The geography here, with all the open ranchland and the way the terrain dips and rises around the Brazos River bottoms, actually funnels the wind. I’ve seen straight-line gusts blow through a neighborhood and take shingles off like they were nothing, and the hail that comes with those cells is often the size of golf balls or bigger, hitting your roof at a steep angle because the wind is pushing it sideways.

What really gets me is that people think because we’re not in “Tornado Alley” proper, we’re safe. But that’s a myth. The hail we get here is dense and icy, not that soft, slushy stuff you see up north. When it’s driven by a 70-mile-an-hour wind, it acts like a thousand little hammers on your asphalt shingles, bruising the mat and knocking the granules clean off. And the wind itself—it doesn’t just lift shingles, it gets under the edges and rips the sealant right off, especially on those hot afternoons when the tar is soft. I’ve climbed up on roofs after a storm in Caddo and seen damage that looked minor from the street, but the decking underneath was soaked because the wind had peeled back the felt paper. You add that to the fact that we get these rapid temperature swings—a 30-degree drop in an hour before a storm—and your roofing materials are contracting and expanding, making them brittle and way more likely to crack on impact. It’s not a matter of *if* your roof will get tested here, it’s a matter of *when*.