Norwood Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here for over twenty years, and I can tell you that Norwood sits right in a bullseye for hail damage. We’re tucked up against the Uncompahgre Plateau, and that geography acts like a funnel for spring and early summer thunderstorms. The warm, moist air coming up from the south slams into that cooler mountain air, and it just stacks those cumulonimbus clouds right over town. By the time those storms roll over the valley, they’ve got plenty of energy to churn out hail the size of golf balls—sometimes bigger. It’s not a once-in-a-while thing either; we get these cells rolling through almost every week from May through July, and a single bad one can leave your shingles looking like someone took a ball-peen hammer to them.

And it’s not just the hail, it’s the wind that comes with it. Those same thunderstorms that drop the ice also produce these violent, straight-line downdrafts that can gust to sixty or seventy miles an hour without any warning. I’ve seen wind lift the edges of perfectly good shingles, and once that seal is broken, the next rainstorm gets underneath and peels them right off. Plus, we get those strong southwest winds in the late fall that blow for days on end, which is brutal on any roof that’s already been weakened by a summer of hail strikes. So when you’re looking at a roof up here, you’re not just hoping for a mild season—you’re planning for the fact that every couple of years, Mother Nature is going to take a real swing at it.