Markham Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over twenty years, and Markham gets hit harder than folks realize. We sit right in that broad, flat stretch of the Coastal Plains, and when a spring squall line rolls in off the Gulf, there’s nothing to break it up. Those storms don’t just pass through—they stall and stack up, and the hail that comes with them is often that big, jagged stuff, not the little pea-sized pellets. I’ve pulled shingles off houses out here that looked like someone took a shotgun to them, and it’s almost always after one of those late-April or early-May supercells that builds up in the afternoon heat and just sits over the rice fields.

The wind is the sneaky part, though. We get those straight-line gusts during the summer that’ll hit sixty or seventy miles an hour without a tornado warning, and they come off the open prairie with zero trees to slow them down. Combine that with the fact that most homes here have that high-pitched roof pitch to shed rain, and you’ve got a giant sail just begging to catch a bad gust. Plus, the heat index in July and August bakes the asphalt shingles brittle, so by the time September’s tropical remnants push through—and we always get at least one good spin-off from a Gulf storm—the granules are already loose. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, and I’ve seen too many folks wait until the ceiling’s stained to call me.