Maxwell Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over twenty years, and Maxwell is a special kind of beast when it comes to hail. You’ve got this perfect storm of geography working against you. We sit right in that open stretch of the Blackland Prairie, with nothing but flat farmland between us and the Hill Country to the southwest. When those spring supercells roll up from San Antonio, they don’t have a single hill or treeline to break them up. They just barrel across the open ground, and the updrafts get so strong that the hail gets to bounce around in the cloud for an extra long time, growing into those golf-ball and baseball-sized monsters. I’ve pulled shingles off houses out here that looked like someone took a shotgun to them, and it’s not just the big ones—even the dime-sized stuff comes in sideways at 60 miles an hour and shreds the granules right off.

And it’s not just the springtime, either. We get a second nasty window in the late fall, usually October into early November, when those cold fronts slam into the last of the warm, humid Gulf air. That’s when you get the straight-line winds, the kind that peel back entire sections of decking like a sardine can. The problem is, most folks think they’re safe because they don’t live in “Tornado Alley,” but we get these microbursts that are just as destructive. The wind comes howling down off the escarpment to the west, and it funnels right through the river bottoms along the San Marcos, picking up speed. I’ve seen brand new architectural shingles lifted right off the nails because the wind got under them just right. It’s a double whammy—hail to bruise the matting and weaken the seal, then a good windstorm to finish the job. If you’ve got a roof that’s over ten years old, you’re basically playing roulette every time the sky turns green out here.