Gleason Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in Weakley County for over twenty years, and I can tell you without a doubt that Gleason sits right in Mother Nature’s crosshairs. We’re smack in the middle of that corridor where warm, muggy Gulf air slams head-on into cool fronts rolling down from the Plains, and that’s a recipe for the kind of violent, spinning thunderstorms you just don’t see in other parts of the state. Our spring and early summer months—especially April through June—are the real troublemakers. Those storms don’t just bring a little rain; they’ll drop hail the size of golf balls or bigger, and the wind can come in straight-line gusts that hit sixty or seventy miles an hour. I’ve pulled shingles off houses that were only five years old because a microburst came screaming through the fields with nothing to slow it down.

What makes it even worse is our geography. We’re surrounded by open farmland and rolling hills, so there’s not a tree line or a ridge to break up that wind before it hits your roof. A storm can build up speed for miles across those flat fields and then just unload on your house like a freight train with no brakes. And because we’re in a bit of a bowl between the Tennessee River and the Kentucky border, the hail tends to get trapped in these rotating updrafts, bouncing around and getting bigger before it finally falls. I’ve seen roofs where the hail actually bruised the shingles so badly that the granules were washed into the gutters, and the wind lifted the edges just enough to let water sneak in under the decking. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit—it’s a matter of *when*, and I’d rather you hear it from me now than after the next big storm rolls through.