Richmond Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over fifteen years, and if there’s one thing I tell every homeowner in Richmond, it’s that your roof is basically sitting in a shooting gallery from March through June. We’re smack in the middle of that notorious “spring squall line” that rolls off the Hill Country and gathers strength over the open prairies west of town. By the time those storms hit the Brazos River bottom, they’ve got nowhere to go but up and over, which creates that violent, spinning updraft that spits out golf-ball-sized hail like it’s nothing. And because our soil is so heavy and clay-rich, the ground heats up unevenly in the late afternoon, which fuels those pop-up supercells that seem to appear out of nowhere right around 5 p.m. – right when you’re pulling into the driveway.

What really gets me is the wind. We don’t get the straight-line hurricane winds you see on the coast, but we get these microbursts that are almost worse. The storms will drop a wall of rain, and then the cold air hits the hot, humid ground and explodes sideways – I’ve seen gusts hit 80 or 90 miles an hour for just a few seconds, and that’s all it takes to peel back a shingle tab or send a tree branch through your ridge vent. Plus, with all the new neighborhoods going in off of 59 and 99, we’ve cleared out the old oak groves that used to break up the wind. Now that flat, open terrain acts like a wind tunnel, and your roof takes the full brunt of every gust that comes screaming off the rice fields. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of *which* spring storm is going to be the one that finally does the damage.