Elmendorf Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over fifteen years, and Elmendorf gets hit harder than folks realize. You’re sitting right in that corridor where the Gulf moisture slams into the dry air coming off the Hill Country, and that’s a recipe for supercell storms that just spin up out of nowhere. We don’t get the long, drawn-out rainy seasons like they do in Houston—ours come in violent, short bursts, mostly in the spring and again in late fall. When those fronts stall right over the county line, the hail isn’t that little pea-sized stuff; we routinely see golf ball and even baseball-sized stones coming down sideways with 70-mile-an-hour winds. And because the ground here is so flat and open, there’s nothing to break up that wind, so it just barrels across the fields and catches your roof at the worst possible angle, lifting shingles and driving water right under the edges.

The real kicker is the age of the homes in this area. A lot of these houses were built in the 80s and 90s with three-tab shingles that just don’t have the impact rating to take a beating like that. I’ll climb up there after a storm and see granule loss that looks like someone took a sandblaster to it, and the hail hits are so concentrated on the south and west slopes that it’s like the storm is aiming for your ridge line. Plus, with the clay soil we’ve got, the ground shifts just enough after a heavy rain that your decking can warp, which makes those shingles even more likely to crack when the next storm rolls through. You might not see a leak for a month, but trust me, that damage is already working its way through the underlayment, and by the time you notice it, you’re looking at replacing the whole sheathing, not just a few shingles.