Putnam Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over twenty years, and I can tell you Putnam gets hit harder than folks realize. We sit right in that corridor where the dry west Texas winds slam into the moist Gulf air, and that collision is like throwing a match on gasoline. Every spring, usually from late March through May, those supercell storms roll in fast off the Caprock, and they don’t just bring rain—they bring hail the size of golf balls, sometimes bigger, and straight-line winds that’ll peel shingles off like they’re nothing. The geography here is flat and open, so there’s nothing to break up that wind before it hits your ridge line, and the hail comes down at an angle, hammering the south and west slopes of your roof the hardest. I’ve seen brand new architectural shingles look like someone took a shotgun to them after one of those April nights.

What makes it worse is the temperature swings we get right before a storm. One afternoon it’s 85 degrees and sunny, then the front blows through and the temp drops twenty degrees in an hour. That sudden contraction makes the shingles brittle, so when the hail hits, they crack instead of flexing. And because we’re in a rural area, the storms often sit and spin over us for a while—they don’t just pass through, they park. That means you get multiple waves of hail and wind in the same hour, and each wave finds the weak spots the first one created. I’ve walked roofs here where the granules are washed off in streaks and the fiberglass mat is showing through, and the homeowner had no idea until I pointed at the ceiling stains inside. If you’ve got a roof older than ten years, you’re not just at risk—you’re a target.