Hail Damage Roof Repair

Texas leads the country for hail, and the Houston area gets its share every spring. The frustrating thing about hail is that a roof can look fine from the ground the next day. What hail does to an asphalt shingle is knock the granules off and bruise the mat underneath. The shingle then dries out, cracks and starts leaking a year or two later, by which point the storm it came from is long forgotten.

From the ground, the signs are dents in soft metal: the gutters, the downspouts, the vent caps, the AC condenser fins. If those are dimpled, the shingles took the same hits. On the roof itself a contractor looks for round bruises with the granules gone, usually in a pattern that follows the direction the storm came from, and checks the soft-metal flashing and vent boots, which hail punctures outright.

Hail damage is usually an insurance question rather than a cash one, and the detail that matters most is your deductible, which on many Texas policies is a percentage of the home value rather than a flat figure. Get the roof inspected and documented while the storm date is still fresh, because a claim filed a year later is a much harder conversation.

Whatever the problem turns out to be, the first step is the same: describe it, say where the house is, and one independent roofing contractor working in your town contacts you to look at it. No charge for being connected, and no obligation once he has.