Palmetto Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in this part of Georgia for over fifteen years, and I can tell you Palmetto gets hit harder than folks realize. We’re sitting right in that corridor where warm, humid air from the Gulf bumps into cooler fronts rolling down from the mountains, and that collision is a recipe for trouble. It’s not just the occasional spring thunderstorm—we get these violent squall lines that blow through in March and April, and again in late summer, that can pack straight-line winds of 60 or 70 miles an hour. Those winds rip shingles right off the edges, and once that protective layer is gone, the next storm’s rain is already working its way into your decking. And because we’re surrounded by open farmland and rolling hills, there’s nothing to break that wind up—it just barrels across the county and slams into your roofline at full force.

But the real sneaky culprit is the hail. We don’t get the giant baseball-sized stones like up in Texas, but we get these dense, marble-to-golf-ball sized pellets that come down at an angle, driven by those same strong winds. That combination is brutal on asphalt shingles because the hail hits the slope at a sharp angle, bruising the mat underneath and knocking the granules loose. You might not even see the damage from the ground—it just looks like a little discoloration—but that’s the shingle’s armor wearing off. Then the sun bakes the exposed fiberglass, it gets brittle, and by the time fall rolls around, you’ve got cracks and missing tabs that you never noticed. I’ve walked dozens of roofs in Palmetto after a storm that looked fine from the street, and the whole south-facing slope was peppered with soft spots. That’s why I always tell homeowners here: don’t wait for a leak to call me. By then, the hail has already done its damage, and the wind just finished the job.