Mims Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you Mims is a different animal when it comes to weather. We sit right in that sweet spot between the St. Johns River and the Intracoastal, which means we get these intense, localized thunderstorm cells that pop up out of nowhere, especially from June through September. Those storms don’t just bring rain—they bring straight-line winds that can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour, and they often come with hail the size of golf balls. The geography here is flat and open, so there’s nothing to break up that wind before it slams into your roofline. I’ve seen shingles that looked fine one day and were completely shredded the next, just from one of those afternoon blow-ups rolling in off the marsh.

And it’s not just the summer storms. We get the tail end of tropical systems and nor’easters that push in from the Atlantic, and those can sit over us for hours, hammering the same spot with wind and sideways rain. The real kicker is the hail—it’s not the big, dramatic hailstones you see on the news that do the most damage; it’s the smaller, dense pellets that come down at an angle and bruise the shingles. That weakens the granules, and then the next hot day the sun bakes them brittle. So by the time a hurricane even thinks about coming near us, your roof is already compromised. I tell folks all the time, if you live in Mims, you’re not asking *if* you’ll need a roof replacement, you’re just asking *when*—and it’s usually sooner than you’d like.