Melvin Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight up—Melvin sits right in a bullseye for some of the nastiest weather in the state. We’re out here on the far western edge of the Hill Country, where the flat prairie starts to roll, and that open land acts like a runway for spring storms. When those cold fronts come screaming down from the Panhandle and slam into the warm, wet air coming up from the Gulf, they don’t just fizzle out—they spin up into these massive, slow-moving supercells that park right over us. And because there’s no mountain range or big tree line to break them up, the hail gets to fall unimpeded, often for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. I’ve pulled golf-ball and even baseball-sized stones out of gutters out here that have punched clean through architectural shingles like they were paper.

Then you’ve got the wind, which is almost worse because it’s so sneaky. Our storm season really peaks from April through June, but we also get those violent October and November squall lines that blow through with straight-line winds hitting sixty or seventy miles an hour. The problem is, most homes in Melvin were built with a standard 4/12 or 5/12 pitch roof, and that’s just enough of an angle for the wind to get underneath the shingle tabs and lift them. Once hail has already bruised and cracked the asphalt, that wind peels it right back, exposing the decking. And with the wide-open exposure we have—no hills or dense woods to block the gusts—that wind just hammers the same spot over and over. So it’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of how many times before you need a full replacement. I’ve seen roofs that looked fine from the street, but up close, the hail had knocked the granules off so bad that the sun was shining through the mat. That’s what you’re up against out here.