Hail Just Hit Omaha. Here Is What to Do in the First 48 Hours.

Every summer some part of the Omaha metro takes a hail storm, and every summer the same thing happens the next morning: trucks with out-of-state plates start working the neighborhood door to door. Some of those companies are fine. Some will be gone by October. The first two days after a storm are when most of the expensive mistakes get made, so here is what we tell friends and family to do.

Hour one: check for anything urgent

Walk the house. If water is coming in, put a bucket under it and call us or anyone else you trust. A leaking roof is an emergency; a hail-marked roof usually is not. Most hail damage does not leak right away. It bruises the shingle, knocks the granules off, and the roof fails over the next year or two. That means you have time to do this right.

Look at the easy tells from the ground: dents in the gutters and downspouts, dings in the metal on the AC unit, torn window screens, splatter marks on the deck or the driveway. Those are the same things an adjuster will look at, so note them now.

Photograph everything before anyone touches it

Take pictures of the gutters, the downspouts, the siding on the side of the house the storm came from, the AC condenser, any skylights, and the ground with hail on it if it is still there. Include something for scale, like a coin or a tape measure. Date-stamped phone photos are fine. You are building the record that says the damage happened on this date, in this storm.

Do not get on the roof yourself. A hail-damaged roof is slick, and a fall costs more than any roof. Getting on the roof and documenting it with photos is what a free inspection is for.

Get an inspection before you file

This is the step people skip. Filing a claim before you know what the damage looks like puts you in the position of arguing with an adjuster using no evidence. Have a local roofer inspect first and give you a photo report. If the damage is real, you file with the report in hand. If it is cosmetic, you saved yourself a claim on your record.

A good inspection report shows the number of hail hits per square, the condition of the soft metals, and whether the siding, gutters and fascia took damage too. Ask for the report whether or not you hire the company. If they will not give it to you, that tells you something.

About the people knocking on your door

Storm chasers are not all crooks, but the business model is built on speed, not on being around next spring. Here are the questions that sort them out in about a minute:

• Where is your office? A real address in the Omaha or Lincoln area, not a hotel.
• Who do I call in two years if a shingle lifts? A name, not a company you have never heard of.
• Can I see your Google reviews? Not a printed sheet of testimonials. The live listing.
• Will you meet my adjuster at the house? A local roofer will. A crew that is leaving in six weeks usually will not.

Never sign a contract that says the contractor gets whatever the insurance company pays. That is called an assignment of benefits, and it hands your claim to a stranger. A written estimate you can read is the only thing you should be signing at this stage.

Filing the claim

Call your agent, tell them the date of the storm, and say you have an inspection report. The adjuster will schedule a visit. Have your roofer there for it. Two people on the roof looking at the same hail hits is how the scope ends up matching the damage instead of being argued about later. We do this for every storm claim in Omaha, Papillion and the rest of the metro, and it is the single most useful thing we do on a hail job.

Once the claim is approved, the scope of work is written down. Anything the adjuster missed, like fascia or a second layer of shingles under the first, gets sent back as a supplement with photos. That is normal. Adjusters see a lot of roofs and they miss things.

Picking the shingle

If you are replacing a roof because of hail, replace it with something that handles hail. Class 4 impact-rated shingles like CertainTeed Landmark ClimateFlex and Owens Corning Duration FLEX shrug off the storm that just wrecked your standard shingles, and some insurers discount the premium for them. We wrote a separate post on whether Class 4 shingles are worth it in Nebraska.

The short version

Check for leaks, photograph the ground-level damage, get a local inspection with a photo report, then file, and have your roofer meet the adjuster. Do not sign anything from a door-knocker on day one. The roof will still need replacing on day ten, and by then you will know exactly what you are buying.

If you are in the Omaha or Lincoln area and hail came through, call or text us and we will get someone on the roof.