Lyons Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight up—Lyons sits right in that nasty little corridor where the Gulf moisture collides with the dry air coming off the Hill Country. That’s a recipe for those pop-up supercells that seem to come out of nowhere, usually starting in March and running all the way through June. We get these hailstones that aren’t just pea-sized; I’ve pulled golf-ball and even baseball-sized chunks out of gutters around here. The problem is, our homes are mostly older ranch-style builds with composition shingles that are already baked by that brutal Texas sun. So when a storm rolls in at 60 miles an hour, those shingles are brittle, and the hail hits them like a hammer on a cracker—it doesn’t bounce off, it shatters the granules and leaves those little black divots that turn into leaks within a year.

And it’s not just the hail, it’s the wind that comes with it. Because we’re so flat and open out here, with nothing but farmland and scattered oaks to break the gusts, those straight-line winds can really get a running start. I’ve seen storms where the wind blows 70, 80 miles an hour, and that’s enough to peel back a shingle’s edge, lift it up, and then the next gust just rips it clean off the deck. The real kicker is that these storms don’t last long—maybe twenty minutes—but they hit with such concentrated fury that they can do more damage than a hurricane. You add in the fact that a lot of folks around here have that older, three-tab shingle that’s past its prime, and you’ve got a perfect storm for needing a new roof every ten years, not twenty. It’s just the nature of living in this spot, and I always tell my neighbors, if you hear thunder, you better start checking your ceilings.