Williston Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight up—Williston gets hammered in a way that surprises folks who just moved down from up north. We sit right in that corridor where Gulf moisture slams into the cooler air coming off the Mississippi Delta, and that’s a recipe for supercell storms. When those things roll through in the spring and early summer, they don’t just give us a little rain; they drop hail the size of golf balls, sometimes bigger, and the wind comes in straight-line gusts that’ll peel shingles right off like they’re nothing. The problem is our geography—we’re flat, open farmland for miles, so there’s nothing to break up that wind. It just builds speed across the fields and hits your roof square on, with no trees or hills to deflect it.

And it’s not just one bad storm a year, either. We get these intense squall lines that blow through in waves, sometimes two or three times a month from April through June, and then again in the fall when the fronts start shifting. That constant pounding does a number on even the best architectural shingles. The hail bruises the asphalt, cracking the granules, and then the wind gets underneath those weakened spots and lifts them. Before you know it, you’ve got a roof that looks fine from the street, but it’s leaking in the attic. I’ve seen brand-new roofs get destroyed in a single twenty-minute hailstorm here, and it’s always the same story—folks didn’t realize how exposed we are out here in the flatlands. You gotta think of your roof like it’s taking a beating every single storm season, and if it’s older than ten years, it’s already fighting a losing battle.