Wilson Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and I can tell you Wilson isn’t like the cities further south. We sit right in that sweet spot where the dry west Texas air collides with the humid Gulf moisture, and that’s a recipe for some of the most violent spring thunderstorms you’ll ever see. When those fronts push through in April and May, they don’t just bring rain—they spin up these tight, rotating cells that drop hail the size of golf balls, sometimes even baseballs. And because our town is so spread out with open farmland around it, there’s nothing to break up that wind. It comes howling across the flatlands at sixty, seventy miles an hour, and it hits your roof flat and hard, lifting shingles and driving that ice into them like buckshot.

What really gets folks is that we get these storms in waves, not just one big event. We’ll have a nasty hailstorm in early spring, and then another one in late May, and sometimes a rogue one in October when the seasons are changing. Each one weakens the asphalt a little more, and by the time the next one rolls through, those granules are already loose and the matting is brittle. Plus, the intense summer heat here—that 100-degree sun—bakes the shingles until they’re stiff, so when that first cold front hits in the fall, the impact cracks them instead of just denting them. It’s a double whammy: the hail bruises the roof, and the wind peels back the edges, and before you know it, you’ve got water seeping into the decking. That’s why I tell my neighbors to check their roofs after every single storm, not just the big ones—because out here, it’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of *when*.