Van Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs out here for over fifteen years, and Van is a different animal than a lot of places. You’re sitting right in that corridor where the warm, humid air from the Gulf slams into the cooler fronts coming down from the north, and that collision is like throwing a match on gasoline. We get these supercell storms that roll through in the spring and again in the fall, and they don’t just give you a little rain—they spin up hail the size of golf balls or bigger, and the wind comes in straight-line gusts that’ll peel shingles right off a deck. The geography doesn’t help, either. We’re surrounded by all these open fields and rolling pastureland, so there’s nothing to break up that wind before it hits your ridge line. A house tucked in a neighborhood in Dallas might get a little protection from the trees and other structures, but out here, your roof is taking the full brunt of whatever the sky decides to throw.

And it’s not just the big, dramatic storms you have to worry about. It’s the constant, sneaky damage that gets you. We’ll get these hail events that aren’t huge, maybe just pea to quarter-sized, but they come with 60-mile-an-hour winds that drive the ice sideways into your shingles at an angle. That’s what really tears up the granules and leaves those little black bruises you can’t see from the ground. Then, a few months later, we get a scorching Texas summer, and that heat bakes the already-weakened asphalt, making it brittle and cracked. So when the next big storm hits in the spring, you’re not just dealing with new damage—you’re dealing with a roof that was already compromised. It’s a cycle, and if you don’t catch it early, you’re looking at a full replacement instead of a simple repair. I tell folks all the time, if you live in Van, you don’t wait for the storm to come to you; you plan for it.