Sudan Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing out here for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Sudan, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye of some of the most violent weather in the state. You see, we’re out here on the high plains, flat as a pancake with nothing but miles of open farmland to break the wind. When those spring storms roll in from the southwest, they don’t have any mountains or hills to slow them down or break them up. They just build up all that energy and hit us with everything they’ve got. We get these supercell thunderstorms that drop hail the size of golf balls—sometimes even bigger—and the wind comes in straight-line gusts that can hit 70 or 80 miles an hour. It’s not like a coastal hurricane where you get a little warning; these things just pop up and hammer us, and the hail comes down at an angle, driving right into the shingles and tearing them loose.

And it’s not just the spring, either. We get a second nasty season in the late summer and early fall when the heat and the moisture from the Gulf collide right over our heads. That’s when you get those slow-moving, training storms that just sit and pound one neighborhood for an hour straight. The hail might not be as big, but it’s relentless, and the wind keeps shifting directions, so it’s hitting your roof from every side. Plus, the temperature swings out here are brutal—we can go from 100 degrees in the afternoon to 50 by evening—and that constant expanding and contracting of your roofing materials makes them brittle. So by the time a good hailstorm hits, those shingles are already stressed, and they just crack and split like glass. I’ve seen roofs that looked fine from the street, but up close, they’re peppered with thousands of little dings that have compromised the mat, and that’s when the real damage starts. You don’t have to see a hole to have a leak; you just need the granules knocked off and the fiberglass exposed, and that wind will peel it right back.