Pulaski Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in this county for over twenty years, and I can tell you Pulaski gets hit from a perfect storm of bad luck. We sit right in that corridor where warm, muggy air from the Gulf collides with cooler fronts rolling down from the mountains, and that’s a recipe for supercell thunderstorms. When those things fire up in the late afternoon, especially from March through June, they don’t just give us a little rain—they spin up straight-line winds that can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour, and hail that ranges from pea-sized up to golf balls. The geography doesn’t help, either. We’re surrounded by flat, open farmland, so there’s nothing to break up that wind before it slams straight into your roofline. A tree line might stop a tumbleweed, but it won’t stop a microburst.

What really gets me is how the hail sneaks up on folks. You’ll see a dark sky, hear a little rumble, and think it’s just another summer shower, but then you’ll hear that popping sound on the siding. That’s the hail, and it’s not just denting your gutters—it’s bruising the shingles, knocking the granules right off the mat. Once those granules are gone, your roof is basically naked, and the next hot afternoon sun will bake the fiberglass until it cracks like an old leather boot. Then the wind, even a moderate gust, will peel those brittle shingles right off the deck. I’ve seen roofs that looked fine from the street, but up close they were covered in hail divots, and the next storm turned them into a tarp situation. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get a bad one here, it’s a matter of *when*, and the older your roof is, the less chance it has of surviving that first big blow.