Carmine Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I tell every homeowner in Carmine, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye of Texas weather. We’re smack in the middle of that corridor where the Gulf moisture comes rolling up from the coast and collides with those dry, fast-moving fronts out of the west. That’s the recipe for the kind of supercell thunderstorms that pop up without much warning, usually in the spring and again in the fall. And because we’re surrounded by open ranchland and farmland, there’s nothing to break up that wind—it just howls straight across the flat ground, picking up speed and slamming into your roof with a force you don’t see in town. I’ve seen straight-line winds here that’ll rip shingles right off the deck like they were stickers, and that’s before the hail even starts.

Now, the hail is the real kicker. We get these storms that sit right over us and just churn, dropping stones that range from pea-sized up to golf balls or even bigger, and they’re coming down at an angle because of that wind. Your typical asphalt shingle is tough, but when you get a combination of that sideways rain and hail hitting the same spot over and over, it’s like someone taking a hammer to the granules. The heat we get in the summer doesn’t help either—it makes the shingles brittle, so when that first big hailstorm hits in April or May, they crack instead of flexing. I’ve pulled off roofs in this county where the hail actually bruised the plywood underneath, and that’s when you’re not just replacing shingles, you’re looking at decking and maybe even your ceiling if you wait too long. It’s not a matter of if you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of when, and I always tell folks to get a good look at their roof before the storm season really gets going.