Fortson Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you Fortson gets hit from a perfect storm of bad luck, geographically speaking. We sit right in that transition zone where the warm, moist air coming up from the Gulf collides with the cooler, drier air sweeping down from the mountains. That clash doesn’t just give us pretty sunsets—it creates those violent, pop-up supercell thunderstorms that seem to form right on top of us in the late afternoon. And because we’re so open, with all these wide pastures and rolling hills, there’s nothing to break up the wind. A straight-line wind event can come screaming across those fields at 70 or 80 miles an hour, and it hits your roof like a wall of water, not a gust.

The real kicker, though, is the hail that comes with those storms. Our spring and early summer seasons—March through June—are the worst, and we get these massive, golf-ball to baseball-sized hailstones that fall almost vertically. They don’t just bounce off; they slam into your shingles with enough force to knock the granules right off the surface. Once those granules are gone, your roof’s protective layer is gone, and the sun starts baking the asphalt underneath. Then, a few weeks later, a weaker storm with just 40 mph winds will come through and peel those now-brittle, bruised shingles right off the deck. It’s a one-two punch: the hail weakens the armor, and the wind finishes the job. That’s why I always tell folks here, if you see a storm roll through with hail, don’t just check your yard—get up on the roof or give me a call, because the damage is already done even if it doesn’t look like it from the ground.