Lake Jackson Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in this town for over twenty years, and I can tell you Lake Jackson has a perfect storm of problems working against your shingles. We sit right in that coastal plain, just a few miles from the Gulf, which means we’re the first thing those big tropical systems and squall lines slam into when they come ashore. The geography here is flat and wide open, so there’s nothing to break up the wind—it just howls straight across the Brazos River bottoms and hits your roof with the full force of an open field. And it’s not just the big hurricanes, either. Every spring and early summer, those pop-up supercell thunderstorms roll through with straight-line winds that can easily hit 70 or 80 miles per hour, and they’ll peel back a shingle like it’s nothing if it’s got even a little age on it.

What really gets you is the hail that comes with those storms. We’re right in that “hail alley” that dips down from the north, and I’ve seen golf-ball and even baseball-sized stones come down here more times than I can count. The funny thing is, people think hail has to be huge to do damage, but it’s the combination that kills you—those strong winds will lift the edge of a shingle, and then the hail smashes it from underneath, cracking the fiberglass mat and knocking the granules clean off. Once that happens, the sun bakes the exposed mat, and within a year you’ve got cracks and leaks you can’t even see from the ground. I’ve walked roofs after a storm where it looked fine from the street, but up close it looked like someone took a shotgun to it. That’s why I always tell folks here, if you hear that hail pinging off your AC unit, don’t wait—call me out to look, because the damage is already done, even if you can’t see it yet.