Pulaski Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in Giles County for over twenty years, and I can tell you Pulaski gets hit from a perfect storm of bad luck, geographically speaking. We sit right in that corridor where warm, humid air from the Gulf slams into cooler air coming down from the Plateau. That collision doesn’t just give us pretty spring sunsets—it brews up some of the most violent, fast-moving supercells in the state. When those storms roll through, usually from March through June and again in the late fall, they don’t mess around. The hail we see isn’t that little pea-sized stuff that bounces off your driveway; it’s often golf-ball or even baseball-sized, and it comes down at an angle with straight-line winds that can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour. That combination is brutal on asphalt shingles, especially if they’re older than ten years.

What makes it worse is our local terrain. We’ve got all these rolling hills and tree lines that break up the wind, but they also create a funneling effect in the valleys and hollows around town. A storm can be calm on one side of the ridge and absolutely tearing your shingles off on the other. The hail gets driven into the granules, bruising the mat underneath, and then the wind lifts those weakened tabs right up. I’ve seen roofs that looked fine from the street, but when I got up there, the hail had fractured the fiberglass mat so badly that the shingles were basically ready to crumble. And because our storms often come in waves—one cell after another—you might get a small hailstorm that does minor damage, and then two weeks later, a bigger one finishes the job. By the time you notice a leak, the decking is already soaked, and that’s when you’re looking at a full replacement instead of a simple repair. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit; it’s a matter of *when*, and being ready for it is the only thing that saves your pocketbook.