Frankston Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over fifteen years, and if there’s one thing I tell every homeowner in Frankston, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye for springtime trouble. You see, our little corner of East Texas sits right on the western edge of that “Dixie Alley” tornado zone, and when those warm, wet Gulf winds slam into the cooler dry air coming off the Hill Country, the sky just goes crazy. We get these massive, slow-moving supercell storms that roll through between March and June, and they don’t just bring rain—they drop hail the size of golf balls and straight-line winds that can hit 70 or 80 miles an hour. The geography doesn’t help either, because we’re surrounded by all these open pastures and flat farmland, so there’s nothing to break up that wind before it slams straight into your roofline.

What really gets me is how the hail here is so deceptive. It’s not just the big, dramatic stones that tear up your shingles—it’s those medium-sized ones, about the size of a quarter, that come down at an angle with that wind behind them. They hit your roof like a thousand little hammers, bruising the asphalt and knocking the granules right off, and you won’t even see the damage from the ground until the next big rainstorm finds those weak spots. And because our summers are so brutally hot and humid, that heat bakes those already-bruised shingles, making them brittle and cracked. So by the time fall rolls around and we get those secondary severe storms in October, your roof is already compromised. It’s a one-two punch, and honestly, if you’ve been here a few years, it’s not a matter of *if* you’ll need a repair—it’s just a matter of when.