Karnack Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I tell every homeowner in Karnack, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye for some of the nastiest weather in East Texas. It’s not just the random thunderstorm—it’s the way the land works against us. We’re tucked right along the edge of Caddo Lake and the big open flats, so when a spring front comes barreling down from the north, there’s nothing to break the wind. It whips straight across that water and open pasture, picking up speed, and by the time it hits your roof, it’s not a gust—it’s a solid wall. And those storms love to roll in right around March through May, when the warm Gulf air collides with those cold fronts. That’s when we see the real hail, too—not just pea-sized stuff, but golf ball and bigger, coming down sideways at sixty miles an hour.

What makes it even worse is the hail itself. Up here, we get that hard, dense ice that forms high up in the clouds, and when it falls, it doesn’t just bounce off your shingles—it hits them like a hammer. I’ve pulled shingles off roofs in Karnack that looked like someone took a shotgun to them, with the granules stripped clean and the fiberglass mat showing through. And the wind? It’s not just about lifting shingles; it’s about that pressure differential. When a strong gust hits your roofline, it gets under the edges and literally peels them back, and once that happens, the next rainstorm is going to find every single weak spot. We also get those late-summer pop-up supercells in August and September that can spin up a microburst out of nowhere, dropping straight down and blowing trees over. So between the spring hailers and those fall wind events, your roof takes a beating every single year. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll need repairs—it’s a matter of how bad it’ll be when it happens.