Storm response
The First 48 Hours After a Hail Storm
What you do in the first two days shapes your claim more than anything that happens afterwards. Most of it costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
Hail moves through in ten minutes. What happens over the following two days determines whether you end up with a properly documented claim or an argument you cannot win.
Hour one: stay off the roof
Do not climb up to look. Beyond the fall risk, walking a hail-damaged roof creates the exact marks you are about to ask an adjuster to assess, and hail-damaged shingles are more fragile than sound ones. Everything useful in the first 48 hours can be done from the ground.
If water is actively entering the house, deal with that first. Buckets under the drip. If a ceiling is bulging, a small hole lets it drain in a place you choose rather than bringing the whole thing down at three in the morning.
Hour two: photograph everything, from the ground
This is the highest-value thing you will do all week, and it takes twenty minutes.
Photograph the hail itself if any is left. Next to a coin or a ruler for scale. This dates and sizes the event better than anything else you will have.
Then photograph the soft metals. These matter more than the roof in the early evidence:
- Gutter faces and downspouts
- Gutter aprons and drip edge
- Vent hoods and any metal housing
- Window wraps and metal trim
- Air conditioning condenser fins
Aluminum does not dent with age. Dented soft metals are the clearest proof that hail hit this house hard enough to matter, and they are visible from the ground.
Then everything else: deck boards, painted surfaces, the garage door, the mailbox, patio furniture, grills, plastic garden items, and any vehicle that was parked outside.
And the wider scene: debris in the yard, shingle fragments, stripped foliage, and the state of your street. Neighborhood-scale evidence supports an individual claim.
Check your phone is recording date and location metadata. Most do by default and it is worth confirming.
Hours 3 to 24: find out whether you actually have damage
Hail damage is mostly invisible from the ground, which is the central difficulty. It bruises the mat under the granules, so the shingle keeps its shape while losing waterproofing life, and the failure surfaces one or two freeze-thaw seasons later.
So a roof that looks fine may be finished, and a roof with a few marks may be serviceable. You need someone on it.
What a proper inspection produces:
- Photographs of every slope, labelled by orientation
- Test square documentation with impact counts per slope
- Close photographs of soft metal evidence
- Photographs of the areas that are sound, not only the damage
- A written assessment you keep regardless of who does the work
That fourth point is the one that separates evidence from advocacy. A report showing only damage reads as a sales document. A report showing the whole roof reads as an assessment, and adjusters respond to the difference.
The door knock, which will come
After a significant Front Range storm, crews arrive in the affected neighborhoods within days. Some are competent and established. Some followed the storm in from out of state and will be gone by November.
Confidence on your doorstep tells you nothing. These four questions sort them quickly:
- Which jurisdiction license do you hold? Colorado has no statewide roofing license. Littleton issues Class D-5, Englewood D-2, Arapahoe County requires ICC Class A, Wheat Ridge requires an ICC exam, Cherry Hills Village issues none at all. Ask which authority will issue your permit and whether they are licensed by it. How to check →
- Where were you based two years ago? A twenty-year warranty from a company that leaves the state after the season is not a warranty.
- Is this a contract or authorization to inspect? Read the heading. A contingency agreement signed on a doorstep can bind you to a contractor before anyone has been on the roof.
- Are you offering to cover my deductible? If yes, the conversation is over.
Waiving it, absorbing it, inflating the invoice to cover it or calling it a discount are all the same thing: defrauding your insurer. The claim is submitted in your name.
It is offered as a favor and it transfers the risk to you. Decline it, and treat it as disqualifying — a company willing to defraud your carrier is not one whose warranty means anything.
Hours 24 to 48: open the claim, if there is one
Once you know what is actually on the roof, call your carrier. You open the claim, not your roofer. They will want the date of loss and will assign an adjuster.
Worth asking them, while you have them:
- Is my roof settled at replacement cost or actual cash value?
- What is my wind and hail deductible? It is frequently separate and higher than the standard one, sometimes a percentage of the dwelling value.
- Do I have ordinance or law coverage, and at what limit?
- Is there emergency mitigation coverage for work already done?
That third one matters locally. Littleton requires full tear-off with no overlays, six nails per shingle, Class H product and ice barrier two feet inside the wall line. If your existing roof predates any of that, rebuilding to current code can cost more than like-for-like replacement, and ordinance or law coverage is what addresses the gap.
Keep every receipt
Tarps, buckets, a night in a hotel if the house is not habitable, emergency mitigation work. Carriers frequently reimburse reasonable steps taken to prevent further damage, but only with documentation.
What can wait
Plenty, and it is worth knowing so you do not feel rushed into signing something.
- Choosing a contractor. Unless water is entering, there is no emergency. Get more than one assessment.
- Choosing materials. That conversation belongs after the claim scope is agreed.
- Scheduling the work. After a metro-wide storm everyone is booked out anyway. Being third in a good contractor's queue beats being first in a bad one's.
Urgency is the primary sales tool after a storm. The genuine urgency is documentation and the claim deadline, and both of those are things you control from your own driveway.