Detroit Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight—Detroit sits right in the bullseye of some of the nastiest spring and early summer weather in the state. We’re smack in the middle of that corridor where warm, humid air from the Gulf slams into cool fronts dropping down from the Panhandle, and that collision is like throwing gasoline on a campfire. Those storms don’t just roll through; they explode right on top of us, often in the late afternoon when the heat peaks. And because we’re out here on the flat, open prairie with not a hill or a tree line to break things up, the wind just screams across the fields with nothing to slow it down. I’ve seen straight-line gusts hit 70 or 80 miles an hour, and when that happens, it’s not just about missing shingles—it’s about the wind getting under the edges and peeling whole sections off like a sardine can lid.

Now, the hail is the real kicker, and it’s a double whammy for us. Those same supercell storms that bring the wind also churn up hailstones the size of golf balls or even baseballs, and they’re not falling straight down—they’re being driven sideways by that wind. That means they’re hammering your roof at an angle, which tears up the asphalt granules and leaves those little black bruises that you can’t see from the ground. And here’s the thing about our geography: we get these storms in waves, sometimes three or four big ones in a single month, and each one weakens the roof a little more. A roof that’s taken a beating in May might look fine in June, but then July’s storm is the one that finally punches through the weakened spots and starts leaking into your living room. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit hard—it’s a matter of *when*, and I’d rather you hear it from me now than find out the hard way after the next big one rolls through.