The First 48 Hours After a Hail Storm: What to Do Before You Call Anyone
Hail moves through Frederick County a few times a year. Usually it is over in ten minutes. What follows is more predictable than the storm: by that afternoon, there are trucks on your street and people at your door telling you your roof is destroyed.
Some of them are legitimate. A lot of them are not going to be in Maryland next spring.
Here is what actually matters in the first two days.
Do not get on the roof
We say this first because it is the thing people ignore. Hail-struck shingles are covered in loose granules, and a wet asphalt roof after a storm behaves like a slide. Every year contractors and homeowners get hurt doing this, and the photos you would get are not worth it.
Anything you need to see can be seen from the ground or from a ladder at the edge.
Take pictures the same day
Not of the roof. Of everything else.
Photograph your gutters, your downspouts, your siding, your window screens, your AC condenser fins, your mailbox, your deck railing, and your car if it was in the driveway. Soft metal dents in a pattern that hail investigators recognize immediately, and those dents are timestamped evidence that hail of a certain size hit your specific address on a specific day.
This matters more than most people realize. Months later, when an adjuster is deciding whether the damage on your roof came from this storm or from age, the dent in your gutter apron is the thing that settles the argument.
Get the date right in your phone’s photo data. Do not retake them next week.
Write down what you saw and heard
Two sentences is enough. “Hail started around 4:15, biggest pieces were about the size of a quarter, lasted maybe eight minutes.” If you have a video, even a shaky one out the storm door, keep it.
Insurance carriers pull weather data for your zip code. Your own account either lines up with it or it does not, and lining up helps.
Be careful who you let on the roof
The person who knocks on your door two hours after a storm may be a roofer. They may also be a sales contractor who will sign you today, subcontract the work to whoever is cheapest, and be unreachable when a seam leaks in February.
Before anyone climbs up there, ask three questions:
Are you licensed in Maryland? Home improvement contractors in Maryland are licensed through the Maryland Home Improvement Commission. You can look up a license number yourself in a few minutes. A real contractor will give you the number without hesitating.
Do you carry your own insurance, and can I see the certificate? If someone gets hurt on your property working uninsured, that is your problem, not theirs.
Where is your office? Not “we serve the whole region.” An actual address.
Do not sign anything that transfers your claim
This is the one that costs people the most money.
Some contracts include language that assigns your insurance benefits over to the contractor, or commits you to using that company for whatever the insurance approves, before anyone knows what the insurance will approve. It might be called an assignment of benefits, a contingency agreement, or a work authorization.
Read what you are signing. If a document gives someone else control of your claim or locks you in before a number exists, you do not have to sign it that day. Anyone pressuring you to sign in the driveway is telling you something about how they do business.
Call your insurance company yourself
You do not need a contractor to open your claim. You can do it in ten minutes, and it is better that your first contact with your carrier is you describing your own property.
Ask for the claim number and write it down.
Then get an honest inspection
Here is the part where we will be straight with you, because it is also our own business we are describing: not every hail storm damages every roof.
Quarter-sized hail on a twenty-year-old three-tab roof is a very different situation from the same hail on architectural shingles installed four years ago. Sometimes the answer really is that your roof is fine and you should not file a claim at all. Filing a claim that gets denied is not free — it goes on your record with the carrier.
A good inspection tells you which situation you are in, in plain language, with photos you can actually see. If someone inspects your roof and cannot show you what they found, that is not an inspection. That is a sales call.
What we do
We inspect for free, we tell you what we actually found, and if your roof does not need replacing we say so. When there is a real claim, we handle the insurance side — the documentation, the adjuster meeting, the supplements when the first estimate misses something — because that process is genuinely miserable to do alone and we have done it hundreds of times.
If hail came through your neighborhood and you want someone to look at it without a sales pitch attached, call us at (410) 292-0801. We will tell you the truth about your roof either way.
