Simms Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in this part of East Texas for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Simms, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye of some of the nastiest spring weather in the state. You’ve got that warm, wet air rolling up from the Gulf, and it slams straight into those cool fronts coming down out of the Panhandle. That collision doesn’t just give us a little rain—it stacks up these towering, angry supercells that love to drop baseball-sized hail right along the Red River corridor. And because we’re so flat and open out here, with nothing but pasture and farmland to break the wind, those straight-line gusts can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour without blinking. I’ve seen storms roll through here in April that stripped shingles off like they were nothing, and the hail leaves those little divots that you don’t even notice until the next big rain finds every single weak spot.

The real kicker is the timing. Our worst months are March through June, but we also get those surprise October and November storms that catch folks off guard. You’ll have a gorgeous, calm morning, and by two in the afternoon the sky’s turned that sickly green color, and the wind shifts so fast you can feel the pressure drop in your ears. That’s when the trouble starts—hail the size of golf balls or bigger coming down at an angle, driven by those gusts, hammering the south and west-facing slopes of your roof the hardest. Over the years, I’ve pulled off old three-tab shingles that looked fine from the street, but underneath, the matting was shattered and the granules were gone, just because of one bad storm back in 2019. If you’re in a newer home with architectural shingles, you’ve got a little more time, but the math is still the same: our weather here doesn’t give you a warning, and it doesn’t care how new your roof is. It just finds the weakest edge and starts peeling.