Roby Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over fifteen years, and I can tell you Roby gets hammered in a way most folks don’t expect until it’s too late. We sit right in that open stretch of West Texas where there’s nothing but flat farmland to break the wind, so when those spring supercells roll in off the Caprock, they don’t slow down for anything. The hail isn’t just pea-sized either—we regularly see golf ball to baseball sized stones coming down sideways with those 60 to 70 mile an hour gusts. And because our soil is so hard and clay-heavy, the ground doesn’t absorb the impact, so the hail bounces right back up and hits your shingles a second time, which is what really tears up the granules and leaves those bare spots that lead to leaks.

The worst part is the timing. Our big storm season runs from April through June, but we also get those surprise October and November cold fronts that can spin up a nasty squall line out of nowhere. You’ll get a bluebird sky at noon and by three in the afternoon, the sky’s turned that sickly green and the wind shifts hard out of the southwest. That’s when the real damage happens—not just from the hail impact, but from the wind lifting the edges of your shingles and peeling them back like a sardine can. Once that seal is broken, the next rainstorm is going to find every weak spot, and with the way our heat bakes the asphalt brittle in the summer, those shingles are already stiff and ready to crack. It’s not a matter of if you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of how many times before you call me out to take a look.