What Should I Expect After A Hail Storm?

What Should I Expect After A Hail  Storm?

Written by Administrator

Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:20

Brought to you by:  //American Siding and Roofing, llc. Here is a list of everything else you should know, how to deal with things, and what to expect. The severity of these things will depend on the size of the storm and your location. Things you’ll see at home: Over the next several months you will most likely have dozens of door hangers, mailers, calls, and knocks at the door with people soliciting to repair your home. Some will be legitimate professional companies who are marketing the storm, while others and the majority will be broke storm chasers from other cities, janitors, bartenders, mechanics, painters, and people from all other professions who are getting into construction as a way to cash in on the storm. The best thing to do to avoid this is to put a USRCT sign in your front yard and put a do not silicate sign on your door. If they still knock, just politely tell them that you are being taking care of and shut the door. Do not let them talk. because they will not stop. Beware of gimmick: We will pay your deductable, free upgrades, $1,000 off. All of this is defrauding your insurance company and against the law. You don’t want to get mixed up in a situation like that. You will see billboards going up everywhere advertising storm damage, cars with ladders on top and want ads in every newspaper. Understand why people pitch locals: After about two months into the storm, everyone will start to pitch “use a local company” “I’m local” What happens is that the insurance company convince people of this, which in turn promotes the use of that type of marketing. Usually this happens later in the storm because storm chasers start to lease the names of local companies to use the name to compete against other storm chasers. By saying “were local” The truth is that the majority of local companies are either not local at start or new businesses popping up that are trying to benefit from the storm. After all how many local roofing, siding, or window companies did you have before the storm? Look for companies driving nicer vehicles: Usually you can tell the credit status of a company by what they drive, as companies who pay their bills usually drive nicer vehicles then companies that don’t. Look for vehicles that have their company name on them in permanent lettering: This assures you that they did not just run out and print a magnetic sign to instantly become a contractor. Do not try to profit from your insurance company: This is something that happens a lot during a Catastrophe storm. People think that they just won the lottery. You didn’t, you are being paid to repair damage on your property. If you use the money for something else or defraud your insurance company two things can happen. You can be guilty of a crime and and/or will not be covered in the event of a future storm. This is important because next time it could be a lot worse, and if your insurance company already paid for work to be done and it wasn’t, they won’t pay again. Beware of local companies who get more work than they can handle: During a storm most local companies who are used to producing 3-5 jobs a week start selling 50-100 per week. This in turn makes it so they do not have the staff in place to manage the jobs. They start hiring new inexperienced worker and quality starts to slip through the cracks. Workmanship gets very poor, and they have a hard time managing everything that is happening. This sometimes results in unpaid labor and/or materials and a possible lien against your home. No matter who you use, make sure they have experience managing the amount of jobs that come along with a weather catastrophe

How Hail is Formed?

How is Hail Formed?

http://www.ucar.edu/communications/factsheets/Hail.html

Brought to you by:///American Siding and Roofing

Nearly everyone welcomes the warm, sunny days of summer. But with summer come thunderstorms, bringing tornadoes, flash floods, and hail. Although tornadoes and flash floods are dramatic by-products of thunderstorms, hail can be far more devastating to property and crops.

Hail is formed in huge cumulonimbus clouds, commonly known as thunderheads. When the ground is heated during the day by the sun, the air close to the ground is heated as well. Hot air, being less dense and therefore lighter than cold air, rises and cools. As it cools, its capacity for holding moisture decreases. When the rising, warm air has cooled so much that it cannot retain all of its moisture, water vapor condenses, forming puffy-looking clouds. The condensing moisture releases heat of its own into the surrounding air, causing the air to rise faster and give up even more moisture.

NCAR scientist Nancy Knight holds a hailstone that fell in Coffeyville, Kansas, in 1970. The largest hailstone ever documented, it weighs 0.75 kilograms (1.67 pounds), and spans 14.4 centimeters (5.67 inches).

Cumulonimbus clouds contain vast amounts of energy in the form of updrafts and downdrafts. These vertical winds can reach speeds over 176 kilometers (110 miles) per hour. Hail grows in the storm cloud's main updraft, where most of the cloud is in the form of "supercooled" water. This is water that remains liquid although its temperature is at or below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). At temperatures higher than -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F), a supercooled water drop needs something on which to freeze, or it remains liquid. Ice crystals, frozen raindrops, dust, and salt from the ocean are also present in the cloud. On collision, supercooled water will freeze onto any of these hosts, creating new hailstones or enlarging those that already exist.

Cross sections of hailstones often reveal layers, much like those of an onion. These layers are caused by the different rates of accumulation and freezing of supercooled water, as the hailstone forms. When there is a great deal of supercooled liquid in the air through which the hailstone falls, water accumulates faster than it can freeze, so a coat of liquid forms. This becomes a layer of clear ice when it does freeze. When a hailstone falls through air with a smaller amount of liquid, the liquid freezes on contact with the hailstone, forming small air bubbles in the opaque layers. The more supercooled water a hailstone makes contact with, the larger and heavier the stone is likely to become. When the hailstone becomes so heavy that the updraft can no longer support it, it falls from the sky.

Hail falls along paths scientists call hail swaths. These vary from a few square acres to large belts 16 kilometers (10 miles) wide and 160 kilometers (100 miles) long. Swaths can leave hail piled so deep it has to be removed with a snow plow. In Orient, Iowa, in August 1980, hail drifts were reported to be 2 meters (6 feet) deep. On 11 July 1990, softball-sized hail in Denver, Colorado, caused $625 million in property damage, mostly to automobiles and roofs. Forty-seven people at an amusement park were seriously injured when a power failure trapped them on a Ferris wheel and they were battered by softball-sized hail.

The emergence of the Insurance Recovery Specialist has given rise to an entirely new arena- Storm chasers.  If you suspect that you have a Hail Damage Roof contact a BBB reputable roofing company ASAP and have them work to have your insurance claim roof settled timely and in an professional manner.

Hail also does a great deal of damage to crops. U.S. costs run into hundreds of millions of dollars annually. While hailstones have been found weighing as much as 0.75 kilograms (1.67 pounds), even much smaller hail can destroy crops, slicing corn and other plants to ribbons in a matter of minutes. Farmers cope with the hail hazard by purchasing insurance. Illinois farmers lead the United States in crop-hail insurance, spending more than $600 million annually. However, U.S. hail is most common in the area where Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming meet, known as "Hail Alley." Parts of this region average between seven and nine hail days a year.

Corn crop damage caused by hail.

Today, farmers seek monetary compensation for hail damage, but in the past, farmers had no recourse when their crops were destroyed. They were left to their own ingenuity to try to suppress hail. In the 14th century, people in Europe attempted to ward off hail by ringing church bells and firing cannons. Hail cannons were especially famous in the wine-producing regions of Europe during the 19th century, and modern versions of them are still used in parts of Italy.

After World War II, scientists across the world experimented with cloud "seeding" as a means of reducing hail size. In Soviet Georgia, scientists fired silver iodide into thunderclouds from the ground. Such methods supposedly stimulated the formation of large numbers of small hailstones, which would melt before they reached the ground, but comparable experiments performed in Switzerland and the United States did not confirm Soviet theory.

While hail suppression continues to elude scientists, sophisticated radar has been developed that can detect the presence of hail before it falls to the ground. Eventually, warnings may be issued as much as 15 minutes before hail strikes, allowing pilots to avoid threatening air space, people to seek shelter, and property to be protected.