Gibson Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here in Scotland County for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Gibson, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye for some of the nastiest spring weather in the state. You see, our little town sits right on that flat, sandy ridge where the coastal plain starts to roll up toward the Sandhills. That might not sound like much, but it’s exactly the kind of terrain that makes thunderstorms explode. When those warm, wet winds blow in from the Gulf in April and May, they hit that subtle rise in the land and get forced upward, like a ramp. That’s when the sky turns that sickly green, and the hail starts. It’s not the little pea-sized stuff, either—we get those big, jagged chunks that come down sideways with the wind, and they hit your shingles like someone took a hammer to them.

And it’s not just the springtime. We get a second nasty round in the late summer and early fall when those tropical systems push up from the coast. Even if we don’t get the full hurricane, the outer bands stall right over us, spinning off supercell after supercell. The wind is the real sneaky killer here. We don’t get the straight-line gusts you see out west; we get these weird, twisting downdrafts that come off the trees and rip shingles right off the edges of your roof, or worse, lift the corners of your flashing. Add in the fact that most of the homes in Gibson were built in the 70s and 80s with those old, brittle three-tab shingles, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of when—and I’d rather see you before the storm than after, when I’m just handing you a tarp and a claim number.