Gordon Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over twenty years, and Gordon sits right in that nasty little corridor where the weather just seems to line up against you. We’re smack in the middle of the Texas “Hail Alley” stretch, and the way the land rolls out flat to the west means those spring supercells roll in with nothing to break them up. When a storm builds over the Edwards Plateau and comes barreling toward us, it’s got a full head of steam, and the hail gets pushed up and dropped like marbles from a dump truck. It’s not just the size of the stones either—it’s the wind that comes with them. We get those straight-line gusts that hit 70, 80 miles an hour, and they’ll peel back a shingle’s edge before the hail even has a chance to bruise the mat. I’ve seen brand new architectural shingles look like someone took a shotgun to them after a single May storm.

And it’s not just the springtime, either. Folks think they’re safe after June, but we get those weird October and November cold fronts that clash with the last of the Gulf moisture, and that’s when you get the sideways rain and the wind that just doesn’t quit for an hour straight. The problem is our homes are built low and wide, with big roof planes that catch the wind like a sail, and the older neighborhoods have that steep pitch that makes it even worse. When the wind comes howling off the Brazos River bottom, it hits that ridge line and creates a little vacuum on the backside, which literally sucks the shingles up and snaps the sealant. Combine that with the fact that we’re surrounded by open ranch land, so there’s no trees or hills to break the force, and you’ve got a recipe where every single storm is a gamble. I tell my customers all the time: if you hear the hail hitting the windows, you better start checking your gutters for granules, because out here, it’s not a matter of *if* you’ll need a roof, it’s a matter of *when*.