Only Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in this part of Tennessee for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Only, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye for springtime trouble. You see, our little valley sits at the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and when those warm, wet Gulf winds come rolling up from the south and slam into that cooler mountain air, it’s like striking a match. That’s when the sky turns that sickly green, and the storms just *stack up*—one cell after another, spinning off the same line. We don’t get the gentle showers they see over in Nashville; we get those tight, violent supercells that drop hail the size of golf balls, sometimes bigger, and they come straight down with the wind, not at an angle. That’s the killer for your shingles—when that ice is falling vertically with a 60-mile-an-hour gust behind it, it’s not just bouncing off, it’s punching little divots into the asphalt, and by the time the next storm hits that same spot, you’ve got a weak point that’s ready to tear.

And it’s not just the spring, either. Folks forget about our late summer and early fall, because that’s when the heat and humidity build up to a boiling point, and we get those pop-up thunderstorms that seem to come out of nowhere around 4 p.m. Those are the ones that catch you off guard, because they’re so localized—one side of the county gets a light drizzle, and the other side gets straight-line winds that snap pine trees like twigs. I’ve seen it happen right on Highway 412, where a microburst will hit just a two-mile stretch and peel shingles off like they were stickers. The problem is, our homes here are mostly older, with that steep pitch to shed snow, but that steep pitch acts like a sail when the wind gets under it. So between the hail hammering the surface and the wind trying to lift the whole deck, it’s a one-two punch that just wears a roof out twice as fast as anywhere else in the state. That’s why I always tell my neighbors here—if you hear that hail hitting the siding, don’t wait for the insurance adjuster to find it. You call me, because I already know where the weak spots are going to be.