Molina Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

You know, living here in Molina, we’re sitting right in that sweet spot where the mountains and the high desert meet, and that’s exactly what works against us when it comes to your roof. The weather systems roll right over the Grand Mesa and then drop down into our valley, and that sudden shift in elevation and temperature just churns the air up something fierce. We get these pop-up thunderstorms in the late spring and again in early fall, and they’re not like the gentle rains you see elsewhere—they come in fast, with straight-line winds that can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour, and they carry hail that’s been bounced around in those clouds until it’s the size of golf balls, sometimes bigger. That combination is a one-two punch: the wind lifts your shingles and gets underneath them, and then the hail slams down on the exposed edges, cracking the fiberglass mat and knocking the granules clean off.

And it’s not just the big storms you have to worry about, either. We get these sneaky little hail events in the middle of summer, too, where the clouds look harmless but they drop marble-sized ice for just ten minutes. The problem is, by that time of year, your roof has already been baking in the high-altitude sun all day, and those shingles are soft and brittle at the same time. So when that hail hits, it doesn’t bounce off—it dents and splits, and the wind that follows peels those damaged spots right back. I’ve seen roofs that looked fine from the street but were completely compromised underneath, just because of one of those quick afternoon cells. It’s not a matter of if you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of when, and that’s why I always tell folks here to keep a close eye on their gutters for granules and check their downspouts after any storm that rolls through.