When a Tulsa Roof Is Past Repairing
One afternoon in May 2024 put baseball-size hail on Broken Arrow and hen egg hail on Jenks. Thousands of roofs in this metro are quietly on borrowed time.
May 21, 2024 Was the Day That Set the Clock
A single storm system crossed the Tulsa metro that afternoon and the National Weather Service logged it town by town. Broken Arrow took hail slightly larger than a baseball, measured at 3.00 inches, and a 2.50 inch tennis-ball event the same day. The survey records damage to vehicles, homes and businesses. Tulsa measured 1.75 inches, golf ball size. Jenks, Bixby and Sapulpa all measured 2.00 inches, which the surveys describe as hen egg size.
Hail that size does not usually make a roof leak that night, and that is the whole problem. It knocks the mineral granules off the surface of the shingle and bruises the mat underneath. The granules are the shingle's sunscreen. Once they are gone, the asphalt is exposed to Oklahoma summer directly, and a roof that had twelve good years left has perhaps three or four.
So the roofs hit in May 2024 are failing now, in 2026, and the owners mostly think the roof simply got old. It did not get old. It got hit.
It Keeps Happening, and the Record Says So
May 2024 was the worst single day, not an isolated one. Every entry below is a logged hail event at a reporting point we serve.
- Collinsville, May 8, 2026, 2.25 inches. "Wind-driven hail up to 2.25 inches in diameter damaged homes, vehicles, outbuildings, and trailers. The hail drifts were up to 2.5 feet deep." Verdigris measured 2.00 inches the same day.
- Claremore, March 27, 2020, 2.00 inches. "Large hail damaged vehicles, and the roofs of homes and businesses." Catoosa logged roof damage from the same system.
- Coweta, April 29, 2016, 2.00 inches. "Hail larger than golfball size damaged the roofs of buildings and vehicles."
- Jenks and Tulsa, May 19, 2025. Another 1.75 to 2.00 inch day across the south side of the metro, one year after the 2024 event.
Tulsa's reporting point alone has thirty-one separate hail events at an inch or more across the past decade. Wind-driven hail is worse than hail falling straight down, because it strikes the vertical faces of the shingle and the ridge where the laps are weakest.
Your Whole Street Is Probably Due at Once
Jenks has gone from a small town to nearly 26,000 people, and Broken Arrow is the largest suburb in the metro. Growth like that gets built in waves, so a subdivision goes up across two or three years and every roof on it is the same age, the same product and the same installation crew.
That means when a hailstorm crosses a neighborhood here, it does not damage one roof. It starts a clock on forty of them simultaneously. If three houses on your street have had roofs replaced in the last year and you have not, that is worth paying attention to rather than taking comfort from.
How We Actually Do the Work
A roof replacement starts with a full tear-off down to the decking. We do not shingle over an existing layer. Going over the top hides whatever is wrong underneath, adds weight the structure was not designed for, and makes the next roofer's job worse.
With the old material off, we can see the plywood. Any sheathing that has gone soft from an old leak gets cut out and replaced before anything else happens, because new shingles are only as good as what their nails are holding onto. Then the underlayment, the ice and water barrier in the valleys and around penetrations, new flashing rather than reused flashing, and the field of the roof.
We install asphalt shingle roofing on most homes in this metro. Metal roofing comes up on rural acreage out toward Inola and Oologah and on some commercial buildings. Flat and low-slope roofing is its own system entirely and shows up on downtown Tulsa commercial property and on porch and patio additions. We do residential roofing and commercial roofing both, and a shop or rental property gets scheduled around your operating hours.
We are an Owens Corning Preferred Contractor and a CertainTeed Authorized Installer, which matters for one practical reason: a manufacturer's material coverage depends on the roof being installed to their specification. Our own workmanship warranty is a transferable lifetime warranty, so if you sell the house it goes with it.
We Would Rather Repair It If a Repair Will Hold
Replacing a roof is the most expensive thing on this website, and plenty of roofs we are called out to look at do not need it. If the problem is one valley, one chimney or one row of shingles, that is a roof repair and we will say so.
The way to find out is to have somebody who is not guessing get up there. Our free roof inspection comes with photographs of what is actually on your roof, and if the damage traces back to a storm you have a claim worth filing. You decide after that, not during a sales conversation on your porch.
Find Out Where Your Roof Really Stands
We will photograph every slope, tell you how much life is left, and put the number in writing. No charge, and no obligation to hire us.