Bennett Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

You know, living here in Bennett, we’re right in that sweet spot where the Front Range weather really cuts its teeth. The geography is the main culprit—we sit out on the high plains, wide open with nothing to break up the wind coming straight off the Rockies. Those big, violent spring and early summer storms roll down from the mountains, and instead of fizzling out, they actually gain strength over the flat, sun-baked ground. That’s when we get those monster hail stones, sometimes the size of golf balls or bigger, and they’re not falling straight down either. The wind whips them sideways, so they’re hammering your roof at an angle, getting under the shingle edges and prying them loose. It’s a one-two punch that just chews up composition shingles.

And it’s not just the big, dramatic storms you have to worry about. We get those relentless, straight-line wind events every summer, the kind that blow in with a wall of dust and just scream for twenty minutes. That constant pressure can lift and curl shingles even if the hail didn’t crack them first. Plus, the temperature swings here are brutal—we can go from a 90-degree day to a freezing night in October, and that constant expanding and contracting makes the shingles brittle. So by the time a severe cell parks over us, which happens more often than you’d think, the roof is already stressed. I’ve seen it a hundred times: a roof that looks fine from the street, but the hail has bruised the matting, and the wind has lifted the tabs just enough that the next big storm is going to peel it right off. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit hard, it’s a matter of *when*.