Somerset 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 Somerset, it’s that you’re sitting right in the bullseye. We’re tucked into that low-lying river valley near the Medina and San Antonio Rivers, and that geography acts like a funnel for spring storms. When those cold fronts come barreling down from the Hill Country and slam into our warm, humid air, the atmosphere just explodes right over our heads. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, but *when*—and the hail we get isn’t that polite pea-sized stuff. I’ve pulled golf-ball and even baseball-sized stones out of people’s yards, and when those come down at a slant with 60-mile-an-hour winds behind them, they don’t just ding your shingles, they bruise the matting underneath and knock the granules clean off like sandpaper.

And it’s not just the springtime tornado season that gets you. We get those violent pop-up thunderstorms in the middle of summer, too, when the heat index hits a hundred and the clouds boil up in the afternoon. Those are the ones that catch folks off guard because they’re so short, but they pack a nasty punch. The wind here is the real sneaky killer—it comes off the open ranch land to the south with nothing to break it up, so it hits your roof flat and hard, lifting those shingle tabs and driving rain up under them. Once that wind gets under a loose edge, it’s like peeling a banana, and then the next hailstorm finishes the job. I’ve seen brand-new roofs in this zip code look ten years old after just one bad August night, so if you’re asking me, it’s not about being unlucky—it’s just the price of living in this beautiful, stormy pocket of Texas.