Pickens County · about half an hour from the office
Roofing in Jasper, Georgia
Jasper is half an hour north on GA-515 and it is the one town on our list where the storm conversation is a different conversation. Pickens County does not get the hail its neighbors get. It gets ice, and it gets trees, and that is a different cause of loss with a different documentation path and a different conversation with an adjuster.
The facts
- County
- Pickens County
- Residential ZIPs
- 30143
- From the office
- 22.2 miles, about 28 minutes free-flow
- How you get here
- GA-515 and GA-5, which bypass the city to the west, with GA-53 running through the center of town. GA-515 has no numbered exits at all — it is referenced by milepost
Who issues the permit
City of Jasper Building Department.
The housing stock
35.7% of Jasper's housing was built between 2000 and 2009 and the median year built is 2002. Across Pickens County 20.8% of the stock predates 1980.
What the storm record says
Pickens County is last of the eight north-metro counties in hail — 1.57 hail days a year against Cobb's 4.30 — and last in damaging wind, while leading all eight in ice storm days (10), heavy snow days (13) and winter storm days (19) over the same thirty years.
What we run into in Jasper
01
Two unrelated federal datasets draw the same line around Pickens County
Under the 2015 energy code that Georgia actually enforces, Pickens is the only one of the eight counties in this part of the state placed in climate zone 4A — Cherokee, Cobb, Fulton, Forsyth, Bartow, Paulding and Douglas are all 3A. That is the Department of Energy's county table, and it has nothing to do with storms. Then the thirty-year National Centers for Environmental Information storm record, compiled independently and for entirely different reasons, draws the identical boundary: Pickens is last of the eight in hail days at 1.57 a year against Cobb's 4.30, last in damaging wind events, and first in all three winter categories — ten ice storm days, thirteen heavy snow days, nineteen winter storm days. Two federal datasets, no shared methodology, one line. That is about as close to proof as a local climate argument gets.
02
The reporting bias runs against the finding, which is what makes it hold
Hail counts depend on somebody phoning them in, and Pickens has about 36,580 people at 158 per square mile against Cobb's 787,538 at 2,318. Fewer observers should push every Pickens number down. Instead its winter counts come back the highest of the eight — because winter storm and ice storm events are issued by the National Weather Service by forecast zone rather than depending on spotters. So the one bias that could explain the result is pointing the wrong way. The mechanism the Weather Service narratives give is cold air damming, which people here call the wedge: cold air backed in from the northeast under a disturbance with Gulf moisture on top of it.
03
Fifteen hundred feet, and what that buys
The town center sits at 1,465 feet — roughly 500 feet above Canton and 700 above Cartersville. That gap is the physical basis for all of the above, and you can see it in a single storm: on 28 January 2014 the Weather Service recorded widespread amounts of three to five inches of snow with isolated higher totals in Pickens, while Cobb, Fulton and Douglas got one to three. Half an hour of driving, twice the snow. Our drive is 22 miles and about half an hour on GA-515 — and note that GA-515 has no numbered exits, only mileposts, so anyone giving you an exit number for Jasper has never driven it.
04
Marble
The Georgia Marble Company was founded in 1884 by Samuel Tate, who leased the marble-bearing land here; the vein runs five to seven miles long, half a mile wide and as much as 2,000 feet deep, and the stone is in the U.S. Capitol. Tate House, built by Sam Tate in the 1920s, is on the National Register, and the Georgia Marble Festival runs the first weekend in October. The permit comes from the City of Jasper's own building department.
Your project manager here
Jason Meeks, project manager, lives in Waleska and carries this town. His and her colleagues are on the team page.
More about Jasper
Questions about Jasper
Do you actually come up to Pickens County?
Yes, and we are closer than most Atlanta roofers — 22 miles and about half an hour from the office, and GA-515 makes it a highway run rather than a mountain crawl. Jasper and Waleska are one project manager's territory for exactly that reason.Is hail damage a thing here?
Less than anywhere else we work, and that is a measurement rather than an opinion: 1.57 hail days a year against Cobb's 4.30 over thirty years. What Pickens does lead the region in is ice, heavy snow and winter storms. If something has come through your roof up here it is far more likely to be a limb than a stone.A tree came down on the house. Is that the same as a storm claim?
It is a claim, and it is a different one. A tree strike is a single-point impact with structural consequences — decking, often rafters — so the inspection, the photographs and the scope all look different from a hail claim, and it is far more often a partial roof plus framing than a full replacement. We document it the same careful way either.
Free inspection
Request an inspection window
Three steps — four if there has been a storm. About ninety seconds.
Get on the roof and know for sure.
Forty-five minutes, dated photographs, a written answer, and no obligation of any kind.