Hail damage
The damage that ends a roof is usually not the damage you can see.
Outside a genuinely violent storm, hail does not put holes in a roof. What it does is bruise it: the stone strikes, the protective granules scatter, and the mat underneath fractures without the surface breaking.
That bruise does nothing at all on the day. Over the following two or three summers, with Pueblo’s ultraviolet working on asphalt that has lost its granule cover, it opens up and water finds it. Which is exactly why a roof that seemed fine after a storm starts leaking years later, long after the claim window shut.
What an inspector is actually looking at
The soft metal first. Gutters, downspouts, vent caps, flashing, anything aluminium. Soft metal records hail honestly, and it cannot be argued with the way a shingle can.
Directionality. Hail rides the wind, so damage concentrates on one or two elevations. A roof can be comprehensively hit on its north and west faces and essentially clean on the south. Anyone reporting uniform damage across every slope has probably not looked carefully.
Test squares. A marked area, usually ten feet by ten, with impacts counted inside it. That is the unit an adjuster thinks in, and a report that does not use it is not speaking the language.
The narrow band problem
Hail swathes are narrow. It is completely ordinary for Pueblo West to be hammered while central Pueblo sees nothing, and for it to reverse the following year.
So neither the absence of activity in town nor the presence of it tells you anything about your own roof. Judge it on your own roof and your own gutters.
After the inspection
If there is damage, the process moves to the claim, and the Colorado statute there is worth reading before you sign anything with anybody.
If there is no damage, that is a legitimate outcome, and an inspector willing to say so is worth more than one who always finds work.
Questions people ask
- What size hail does damage?
There is no clean threshold. Small hail driven hard damages more than larger hail falling slowly, and an older, more brittle shingle bruises at a size a new one shrugs off. Age of roof matters as much as size of stone.
- How soon should I get it looked at?
Weeks rather than months. Policy deadlines are shorter than people expect, and establishing which storm did it gets harder the longer you leave it.
- Can a drone do the inspection?
For documentation, partly. For assessment, not really. Bruising is as much felt as seen, and a competent inspector is pressing on suspect areas rather than photographing them from above.