Claude Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight—Claude sits right in the bullseye for some of the nastiest weather in the Texas Panhandle. We’re out here on the high plains, flat as a pancake, with nothing but open ranchland between us and the Rocky Mountains. That means when a spring storm system rolls in from the west, it doesn’t have any hills or trees to break it up. The wind just screams across the caprock, and those supercell thunderstorms that pop up in April and May love to drop hail the size of golf balls—sometimes bigger—right on our heads. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of *when*, and I’ve seen brand-new shingle roofs look like someone took a shotgun to them after one twenty-minute pass.

And it’s not just the spring. We get those wild October and November cold fronts that slam into the warm, moist air still hanging around, and that’s a recipe for straight-line winds that can hit 70 or 80 miles an hour. Those winds don’t just peel shingles off; they lift them up and flap them like a loose page in a book, which lets the next rainstorm drive water right into your decking. Plus, the freeze-thaw cycle we get in the winter—where snow melts during the day and refreezes at night—will crack any granule that’s already been bruised by hail. So when you combine the flat, exposed geography with that double whammy of spring hailers and fall windstorms, your roof is basically taking a beating from every angle. That’s why I always tell folks around here: don’t wait for the insurance adjuster to find the damage. You call me after the first big storm, and we’ll get up there and look before the next one turns a small leak into a total replacement.