A prairie hailstorm can bruise a roof in a few minutes and leave almost nothing you can see from the driveway. Working through it in the right order protects your home now and your options later.
W Contracting Roofing is a Saskatoon roofing company, and the steps below are the order we work through after hail.
Here is what to do first, what to look for, and how to tell whether you are facing a repair, a full replacement, or an insurance claim.
Start with safety, then secure the house
Once the storm has passed, check on everyone in the house before anything else. Inside, look at the ceilings and around light fixtures for fresh water stains or active drips. If water is coming in, move furniture and electronics clear, put down a bucket or a bin, and photograph the spot before you mop it up.
Stay off the roof. Wet shingles covered in hail are slick, and a fall does far more damage than the storm did. If there is a branch or debris up there, leave it for a crew with the right footing and harnesses. Your job right after a storm is to keep people safe and limit water damage inside, not to get on a ladder.
What prairie hail actually does to a roof
Hail rarely punches a clean hole. On asphalt shingles it bruises the surface, knocking off the granules that protect the shingle and exposing the mat underneath. Those bruises shed more granules over the following weeks, and that is where the slow leaks start. On soft metal, hail leaves dents you can read like a fingerprint: vents, flashing, and eavestroughs all take marks.
The tricky part on the prairies is that this damage is often invisible from the ground for a while, then shows up as a stain on a bedroom ceiling in the fall. That gap between the storm and the symptom is why a careful check right after the hail is worth the effort.
Do a ground-level damage check, no ladder needed
Walk the yard and the outside of the house and look for the soft-metal clues first. Dents on eavestroughs, downspouts, roof vents and the metal caps around the chimney all point to hail heavy enough to bruise shingles. Check the window screens, the siding, the deck boards and the fins on the air conditioner for the same dinging.
Then look for granules. A pile of dark, sand-like grit at the bottom of a downspout or washed into the eavestroughs is shingle surface that the hail knocked loose. If the soft metal around your house is dented and there are granules in the gutters, the roof almost certainly took hits too, even if the shingles look fine from below.
Write down what happened while it is fresh
Note the date and rough time of the storm while you remember it. Photograph the damage you can safely reach from the ground, and if there is still hail on the lawn, get a shot of it next to something for scale, like a coin or a ruler. Save any weather alert or local news about the storm.
This record does two things. It gives a roofer a clear starting point, and if you end up filing a claim, it ties the damage to a specific storm on a specific day. That link between the damage and the event is one of the things an adjuster looks for.
Get a professional roof inspection
The only way to know what the hail actually did is to have someone on the roof who can tell storm bruising from ordinary wear and from cosmetic marks that do not affect how the roof performs. W Contracting does HAAG Certified inspections, which is the standard insurers recognize for storm damage. We document everything with photos and video and walk you through what we found.
Because the inspection is free, there is no downside to booking one after a real hailstorm. You either get peace of mind that the roof is fine, or you get the documentation you need to move forward, and you find out before a small bruise becomes a winter leak.
Then decide: repair, replace, or file a claim
Isolated, minor damage on a roof with years left in it is often a straightforward roof repair. Widespread bruising on a roof near the end of its life usually points to a replacement, and that is frequently where an insurance claim comes in. Our storm and hail damage restoration page covers how we handle the whole job.
Whatever the answer, do not rush it and do not sign anything before you know what is on the roof. If a claim is on the table, the next step is understanding the process, which we cover in how to file a hail damage insurance claim in Saskatchewan.