Ordway Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been re-roofing homes here in Ordway for over twenty years, and I can tell you firsthand that our little valley sits right in Mother Nature’s crosshairs. We’re tucked up against the Wet Mountains and the high plains, and that geography acts like a funnel for spring and early summer storms. When those big, angry cumulonimbus clouds build up over the Sangre de Cristos and start rolling east, they slam into the warmer, drier air coming off the prairie, and that’s when the sky just opens up. We get these sudden, violent hailstorms that aren’t just a few pebbles—I’m talking golf-ball and even baseball-sized stones that come down sideways with a wind that’ll peel shingles right off the deck. The hail hits with so much force that it bruises the asphalt, knocking the granules loose, and then that same wind gets under the edges and lifts them like playing cards. It’s not a matter of *if* your roof takes a beating, but *when*.

And it’s not just the springtime, either. Our storm season stretches from late April all the way through September, with a nasty second peak in late summer when those monsoon moisture surges come up from the south. That’s when we get the real microbursts—straight-line winds that can hit sixty or seventy miles an hour without a drop of rain. I’ve seen those winds rip entire ridge caps clean off, especially on homes that have a steeper pitch, because the pressure differential just grabs hold. The combination is brutal: the hail weakens the shingle’s protective surface, and then the wind does the rest, exposing the felt and the decking to the next round of sun and moisture. By the time October rolls around, I’m usually booked solid with repair jobs, and most of them are on houses that looked fine in July but were already compromised. You might not see the damage from the ground, but trust me, the storm already wrote the check—it’s just waiting to cash it.