Midway Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in this county for over twenty years, and I can tell you Midway gets hit from a perfect storm of bad luck. You’re sitting right in that coastal plain where the heat builds up all afternoon, and then those summer thunderstorms just explode out of nowhere. They don’t roll in slow like they do up north—they drop out of the sky with straight-line winds that can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour, and the hail that comes with them is often that nasty, quarter-sized stuff that feels like someone’s throwing rocks at your shingles. The geography doesn’t help either; you’ve got all that flat, open marshland and farmland around you, so there’s nothing to break up the wind’s momentum before it slams straight into your roofline.

And it’s not just the summer pop-up storms you have to worry about. We get those strong cold fronts pushing through in the late winter and early spring, and that’s when the real damage happens. Those fronts will line up with the Gulf moisture and just sit there, spinning out supercell after supercell. I’ve seen hail in March that shredded architectural shingles like they were paper, and the wind will lift the edges of your flashing before you even know what’s happening. The worst part is, people here get complacent because we don’t see tornadoes every day, but we get the outer bands of those systems, and that’s where the hail gets big and the wind gets straight-line and violent. If your roof is over ten years old, it’s already lost some of its granule protection, and that’s exactly when a storm like that finds the weak spot.