Pritchett Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here for over twenty years, and I can tell you straight—Pritchett sits right in a bullseye for this kind of trouble. We’re tucked up against the eastern edge of the Rockies, where the warm, wet air coming up from the Gulf slams into that cooler mountain air, and that’s a recipe for the kind of supercell storms you just don’t see down in the flatlands. Those storms don’t just roll through; they sit and spin, and they’ll drop hail the size of golf balls—sometimes bigger—for twenty minutes straight. And because we’re at this elevation, the wind doesn’t have any trees or hills to break it up, so it comes at your roof sideways, driving that hail right under the shingle edges and into the valleys where the flashing is. It’s not a matter of *if* you’ll get hit, it’s a matter of *when*.

The worst of it hits from late April through June, and then again in September when the fall fronts start pushing through. I’ve seen brand-new architectural shingles look like someone took a shotgun to them after one of those May storms, and the wind gusts up here can easily hit 70 or 80 miles an hour—that’s enough to peel back a whole section of decking if the nails weren’t set just right. The real kicker is the temperature swing, too. We’ll get a hot, sunny afternoon and then a cold front drops the temp twenty degrees in an hour, and that makes the shingles brittle right as the hail starts. So when you hear thunder rolling in from the west, you’re not just hoping for rain—you’re hoping your roof can take a beating, because around here, it’s going to get one.