Clarendon Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here in the Texas Panhandle for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Clarendon, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye for some of the nastiest weather in the country. You see, we’re out here on the high plains, flat as a pancake, with nothing but open ranchland between us and the Rocky Mountains to the west. When those spring storms roll off the caprock, they don’t have any hills or trees to break them up—they just barrel across the prairie and slam straight into our homes. That’s why every April and May, we get those supercell thunderstorms that drop hail the size of golf balls, sometimes even baseballs, and the wind comes with them like a freight train. It’s not just the big storms either; even a quick summer thunderstorm can kick up straight-line winds of 70 or 80 miles an hour, and that’s plenty to peel back shingles and send debris flying into your roof.

What makes it even worse is the way our weather patterns set up. We’re right on the edge of that dry line, where warm, moist air from the Gulf meets hot, dry air from the desert, and that collision happens right over our heads almost every single week from March through June. That means we get these sudden, violent hailstorms that come out of nowhere, and they don’t just hit one neighborhood—they can pound the whole town for twenty minutes straight. And because our winters are so cold and windy, the shingles on older homes get brittle and cracked, so when that first big hail storm hits in the spring, they’re already weakened. I’ve seen roofs out here that looked fine in February, but after one good storm in May, they’re done for. It’s just the nature of living on this land—you’re going to get hammered, and if you don’t have a good, thick roof, you’re going to be calling me sooner rather than later.