Hartman Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been roofing here for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I tell every homeowner in Hartman, it’s that we’re sitting right in Mother Nature’s crosshairs. You see, we’re out here on the high plains, with nothing but open prairie between us and the Front Range. When those spring and early summer storms roll off the mountains, they don’t have any hills or trees to break them up—they just barrel across the flatland, picking up speed and energy. That’s when we get those sudden, violent hailstorms that seem to come out of nowhere around May and June. The hail isn’t just pea-sized either; we regularly see golf ball and even baseball-sized stones that hit your roof like a sledgehammer, bruising the shingles and cracking the granules right off. And because the wind is so constant and strong out here, it doesn’t take much for a storm to rip a few shingles loose, and once that happens, the next rain is coming straight into your attic.

It’s not just the big storms you have to worry about either. We get these nasty, straight-line wind events—sometimes called microbursts—that can hit 80 or 90 miles an hour for just a few minutes, and they’ll peel back an entire section of roofing like it’s a tin can lid. The geography is what does it: we’re in a bit of a bowl between the Arkansas River valley and the higher ground to the north, so the wind gets funneled and twisted right over the town. Plus, our storm season isn’t just one month—it stretches from April all the way through September, with a second spike in October when those cold fronts come crashing down from Canada. I’ve seen roofs that were perfectly fine in March look like Swiss cheese by July. Honestly, if you’ve got a roof that’s more than ten years old, it’s not a matter of *if* it’s going to get damaged, it’s a matter of *when*—and I’d rather you hear that from me now than after the next big one hits.