Fleming Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Fleming, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye of Colorado’s worst weather. You see how flat it is out here? That’s the problem. We’re on the high plains, just east of where the Front Range mountains dump all that warm, moist air. When that air hits the open prairie, it has nowhere to go but straight up, and that’s what stacks those towering, angry thunderheads right over our heads. We don’t get the gentle spring showers they see in Denver; we get these violent, slow-moving supercells that just sit and spin. And because there’s nothing but flat farmland to break up the wind, those storms roll through here with straight-line gusts that’ll peel shingles right off a brand new roof like they’re nothing.

The timing is what really gets you. Our worst months are May and June, but we also get a nasty second round in late September. That’s when the jet stream dips down and collides with the warm, humid air coming up from the south. The hail we get isn’t that little pea-sized stuff—it’s usually golf ball or bigger, and I’ve pulled up chunks the size of baseballs out of people’s yards. The combination is brutal: the wind lifts the edges of your shingles, and then the hail slams into them at a forty-five degree angle, cracking the fiberglass mat and knocking the granules clean off. Once that protective layer is gone, the sun bakes the asphalt, and within a year you’ve got cracks you can see from the street. It’s not a matter of *if* your roof takes a beating out here, it’s a matter of *when*—and if you’ve got a roof that’s more than ten years old, you’re basically playing roulette every time the sky turns green.