‘It was crazy’: Extreme tests that show why hail is a multi-billion dollar problem

The scars remained on houses they sometimes look like shotgun blasts. In the wake of severe storms, Andrew Shick, owner and CEO of Illinois-based Roofing USA, drove through hail-affected suburbs and was stunned by the damage.

Earlier this year, he visited a farming convoluted in western Illinois where roofs, even those made of solid metal, were left pockmarked and pitted after 3-inch balls of ice fell from the sky. “It was crazy,” he recalls. There were even baseball-sized holes in the lawn. “I’ve never seen this before.”

Shick has been operating in the roofing industry for several years. He says he feels like the hail storms are getting stronger. There is certainly hail damage more and more expensive fix with inflation. Insurers are there adapting your policy demand higher deductibles from people affected by hail damage. “Many clients I see had no idea their policies had changed until hail hit their roof,” Shick says.

There’s no denying that hail is getting really, really high-priced. In 2024, hail damage in the U.S. will cost more than damage from hurricanes and floods combined. This year, hail-related expenses amounted to it is estimated that they amounted to tens of billions of dollarsprobably around $40 billion. Just 15 years ago, the annual cost of hail damage was less than $1 billion, says Tanya Brown-Giammanco, director of disaster and accident research at NIST, a non-regulatory agency that works on standards and benchmarks for a wide range of products. Apart from the problem of inflation, there are more moving to hail-prone areas of the United States.

Hail forms when currents of rising air in a storm carry raindrops upwards to the cooler parts of the storm, where they freeze. The pellets then grow as they come into contact with more moisture, which freezes on their surface. When they become too weighty to keep in the air, they fall as hail.

Although the data shows this Violent storms with hail are becoming more and more frequent in the US in recent years, no one is quite sure whether or how climate change will affect future hail events. We still don’t know a surprising amount about hail and its precipitation in the air. Companies are increasingly selling hail-resistant roofing materials as homeowners come under increasing pressure to fortify their properties against weather bombardments. But when fist-sized hail hits your roof, can you do something to save it?

Most people would despair if their house was hit by a giant hailstorm. Not Becky Adams-Selin. Last summer, 3-inch rocks crashed into her Nebraska property, damaging the roof. As soon as the storm ended, Adams-Selin, chief scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, ran outside to collect samples. She still has some rocks she collected in the freezer. “I thought, ‘I have more data!’” she says.