Stephenville Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been patching roofs out here for over twenty years, and I can tell you Stephenville gets hit harder than folks realize. We sit right in the heart of the Texas Hill Country transition zone, where the flat prairie meets those rolling hills, and that’s a recipe for trouble. When those spring storms roll in off the Caprock, they don’t have any mountains to break them up. The wind just screams across the open pastureland, and the hail gets tossed around in those supercells like popcorn in a hot pan. I’ve pulled golf-ball and even baseball-sized stones out of yards that have shredded composition shingles down to the felt, and it’s not just the big ones—even the dime-sized stuff, when it’s coming at you sideways at 60 miles an hour, can bruise the shingles so bad they lose their granules and start baking in the summer sun.

And it’s not just spring, either. People think they’re safe after May, but we get those pop-up thunderstorms in June and July that can drop a quick, violent hailstorm out of nowhere, and then the real kicker is the fall. Those cold fronts pushing down from the north slam into the warm, humid air still hanging around, and that’s when we see the long, linear wind events—straight-line winds that can hit 80 or 90 miles an hour. That’s what peels back shingles right off the deck, especially on those older roofs with brittle tabs. The geography here just funnels that energy right down the Bosque River valley, and if your house is on the west or south side of town, you’re basically standing in the bullseye. I tell my customers all the time: it’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of *when*, and being ready before that first big storm of the season is the only thing that saves your ceiling.