Various businesses have been extra busy since a rare hail storm hit the Grand Valley in June

Tim Harty, The Business Times 

Grand Valley roofing companies get busy in the summer. As in new jobs get scheduled three to four weeks out, and be thankful if the wait is shorter.

This summer, however, Mother Nature made a mockery of the notion it doesn’t hail around here and conjured up a June 6 rainstorm that brought hail in sizes rarely seen in the Grand Valley. Golf-ball-sized hail pelted homes in some areas, and that meant the valley’s already super-busy roofers got a whole lot busier.

As did auto-body shops.

As did insurance agencies.

A roof replacement or repair? Be happy now if the roofer can get to it inside of two months.

Makala Reid, assistant manager at Bros Roofing, 2420 E. Main St. in Grand Junction, said Bros is scheduling jobs six to eight weeks out, which is two to three weeks longer than normal summer scheduling has been.

At Kruger Roofing, 1050 Kimball Ave. in Grand Junction, Manager Aaron Nordstrom said they’re scheduling about two months out. He said that’s not much different than a regular summer, but the amount of estimates Kruger has been doing has gone through the proverbial roof, and the amount of work has increased about 20 percent.

Kruger is handling that by hiring extra workers, when it can find any, and having existing roofers work longer days and on weekends as needed.

“We just schedule them out. We try to fit it all in. And we will hire (if possible),” Nordstrom wrote in an email interview. “But … we have a bunch of estimates that we have not even gotten out to. Estimating is our choke point for this type of situation. We are servicing and estimating our current customers as priority, and since we have been in the valley for so long, we have a lot of customers calling. Then we try to service referrals. And we have a lot of referrals, which is where most of our business comes from.”

Bros Roofing also is hiring more workers, working longer days and weekends. Reid said Bros tended to do five to six roofing jobs per week in recent summers, but this summer its tackling nine to 11 jobs per week.

Busy at the auto body shops

Of course, homes weren’t the only things that got hit by those bigger chunks of hail. Plenty of cars and trucks got riddled with small dents on the roofs, hoods and side panels.

Dean Moore, co-owner of Moore’s Auto Body, 2488 W. Mesa Court in Grand Junction, said ever since June 6, “We’ve been extremely busy with the hail claims, extremely busy. So is every shop. So, yeah, it bumped everybody up.”

Moore said it pushed out scheduling of repairs a few weeks beyond the normal, and he brought in extra help to handle the additional work.

For example, Phillip Isabel, a paintless dent repair technician for ADAS Solutions, usually finds his work on Colorado’s Front Range, particularly around Denver. For the past several weeks, however, he’s been popping up dents at Moore’s Auto Body.

Moore mentioned the hail-damaged vehicles coming to his shop mostly need small dents repaired. 

Only a small percentage of hail-damaged vehicles have had windshield damage.

That helps explain why The Glass Doctor, 424 S. Seventh St. in Grand Junction, hasn’t seen many vehicles with windshields cracked in the June 6 hail storm.

For that matter, Glass Doctor owner Domenic Modica said he hasn’t had much come his way for damage to windows in homes. Be it home or auto, Modica said hail damage would probably cause more than glass breakage – dents to a car, hail damage to a roof – where a customer would then go to a business that repairs more than glass, such as a collision center or a building contractor.

Office Manager Tanya Stuckman said The Glass Brokerage, 118 N. 22nd Court in Grand Junction, received an increase in calls, especially for residential after the hail storm. But when a repair was merely for glass, the cost tended to be less than the homeowner’s insurance deductible, meaning claimants had to pay out of pocket if they proceeded with repairs.

“We provided a lot of quotes,” she said, adding, “Six to eight weeks later, we’ve still been getting calls.”

Stuckman mentioned, too, she moved to Grand Junction 20 years ago, and she’s never seen hail in the Grand Valley as big as what the June 6 storm produced.

‘We don’t deal with that here’

Whether it was homes or cars that got damaged by hail, local insurance agencies heard all about them.

Matt Borg, owner of independent agency MB Insurance, 573 W. Crete Circle, Unit 205, in Grand Junction, said he thinks when all is said and done, the June 6 storm is going to be the largest insurance claim event in the Grand Valley’s history.

Borg said from the claims his office has received, Fruita and Orchard Mesa appear to have been the hardest hit by hail.

He added home claims have included a fair amount of damaged fences, especially the vinyl fencing.

“Some look like they got shot with a gun,” he said.

Matt Bird, owner of Bird Family Insurance Agency, 125 Grand Ave, Ste B, said the increase in claims calls after the hail storm “had us hopping around.”

“We don’t normally see hail storms,” he added, “so a lot of it was people calling, saying, ‘Hey, what do we do?’”

In his customers’ defense, Bird said of the hail, “We don’t deal with that here, so no one really knew what to do unless they moved here from Denver or something.”

Bird said his agency was getting dozens of claims calls in the first couple of weeks after the hail storm, which was new for him, too.

“I mean, from zero to 12, 15, 20 calls a week for a month and a half there, really,” he said. “So, yeah, it was busy.”

The frequency has diminished, but claims calls are still trickling in.

“We’re in August now, it’s been 60 days,” he said, “and people are still calling, saying, ‘Hey, I want to know if I can get get my roof replaced.’”

Be safe: Use established, local roofers

While conducting interviews for this story, a recurring theme surfaced from roofing and insurance companies: Beware of fly-by-night roofing companies.

Bird Family Insurance Agency owner Adam Bird said his office got a rush of calls to make claims on roofs after a June 6 hail storm dropped uncharacteristically large hail on parts of the Grand Valley.

After a couple weeks, the amount of calls lessened, but then they picked up again, and Bird’s pretty sure the resurgence was fueled by out-of-town companies chasing the storm fallout.

“The door knockers came out in force,” he said. “It was really interesting. We had a lot of clients call and say, ‘Oh, hey, this guy from this company came by my house,’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve never heard of that company.’ And you look it up, and they’re from Denver, they’re from Salt Lake, or they’re from wherever. They send this army of people out here to just knock on doors, storm chasing.”

Making it clear what he thinks of the “door knockers,” Bird said, “It’s definitely not a great thing. They way overcharge for a roof compared to what it should cost. You know, they’re trying to make a quick buck, and there’s been stories in the past of them not doing the work properly and just skipping town.”

Representatives from Bros Roofing and Kruger Roofing sounded the alarm, too.

“Remember to hire a local roofing company!” Bros’ Assistant Manager Makala Reid wrote. “Too many out-of-town companies coming in and cutting corners.”

Also, Bros Roofing warns people to make sure the roofing company attains the required permit for the work.

Kruger Roofing Manager Aaron Nordstrom kept his answers short and to the point in an email interview with The Business Times. But he made an exception when addressing out-of-town roofing companies popping up in the hail storm’s aftermath.

To that, he wrote: “Kruger Roofing is truly a local roofing company that has been in the Grand Valley for the past 35 years. We aren’t going anywhere, and customers can have peace of mind that we will be here to respond to any roofing need. We have great customers, and we highly value their trust.

“There are a lot of out-of-town roofers that are in the Grand Valley chasing the storm. That is not our model and never has been. We strive to give an honest and thorough opinion of the roof condition. Our desire is truly for the customer to have all the information that they need to make the best choice for their situation, especially when they are dealing with insurance companies.”