Cost Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over twenty years, and I can tell you that Cost, Texas, sits right in a bullseye for this kind of trouble. We’re smack in the middle of the I-10 corridor between San Antonio and Houston, and that flat, open prairie does us no favors. When those spring supercells roll in off the Hill Country, they’ve got nothing to slow them down—no hills, no tree lines, just wide-open ranchland. That means the wind can scream through here at 70 or 80 miles an hour without losing any punch, and it tends to wrap around the eaves and lift shingles like a crowbar. And the hail? It’s not those little pea-sized pebbles you see up north. We get the big, jagged, baseball-sized chunks that come down at an angle, driven by that same straight-line wind, and they just pulverize the granules off your asphalt.

The real kicker is the timing. Our worst storms aren’t in the summer—they hit in April and May, right when the jet stream dips down and collides with that warm, sticky Gulf moisture. You’ll get a bluebird sky at noon, and by three o’clock the sky’s turned that sickly green, and the hail’s pounding down for twenty minutes straight. I’ve seen roofs that looked fine from the street, but up close, every single shingle is bruised and split, with the fiberglass mat exposed. And because the wind comes in those violent, gusty bursts, it’s not just the impact—it’s the uplift. It’ll peel back the edges of your ridge caps and tear the flashing loose around your chimney, and then the next rainstorm does the real damage from the inside out. If you’re in Cost, you’re not asking *if* you’ll get hit, you’re just hoping the last storm didn’t leave you with a ticking time bomb overhead.