Snook Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs in Burleson County for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Snook, it’s that we’re sitting right in the heart of hail alley. You see how flat and open this land is? We’ve got nothing but miles of prairie between here and the Hill Country, so when those spring supercells roll in off the Edwards Plateau, they don’t have a single hill or tree line to break them up. That means the winds stay tight and violent, and the hail gets tossed around in that updraft like marbles in a blender. I’ve pulled golf-ball and even baseball-sized stones out of gutters here that have punched clean through architectural shingles, and the worst part is, it’s not just the big ones—it’s the sheer volume of quarter-sized hail that comes down sideways at 60 miles an hour, shredding the granules off your roof until the matting is exposed.

And it’s not just spring, either. Folks think they’re safe after May, but our real danger window runs from March all the way through June, and then again in October when those cool fronts slam into the leftover Gulf humidity. That collision creates those rotating supercells that drop straight down the Brazos River valley, and Snook is right in the bullseye because we’re on the eastern edge of the dry line. I’ve seen straight-line winds here that’ll peel a ridge cap right off like a sardine can lid, and the hail doesn’t need to be huge to do damage—it just needs to be dense and driven by those 70-mile-an-hour gusts. The real kicker is that our clay soil here expands and contracts like crazy, so your roof deck is already shifting and stressing those shingle seals, and one good hailstorm is all it takes to turn a few loose tabs into a full-blown leak. Trust me, if you’ve got a roof older than ten years in this town, you’re not asking *if* it’s going to get hit—you’re just waiting for the next storm to come calling.