Colorado’s Front Range faces a risk of hail damage unlike any other area in the country, and it also happens to bewhere homeowners have installed solar panels on their roofs at some of the highest rates, according to a study from Roof Gnome, a platform that connects consumers with roofing and solar installation contractors.
The combination can be a costly one when storms do hit and a contributor to rising home insurance premiums in the region.
“Hail accumulation is an uncommon phenomenon but is most prevalent along the front ranges along the Southern Rocky Mountains,” said Gnome editor-in-chief Jeff Herman in comments included with the study.
The study examined 604 U.S. counties susceptible to moderate to significant hail damage, per FEMA, the federal agency charged with responding to natural disasters and other emergencies.
Of that hail-prone group, the counties most at risk of suffering the heaviest financial losses were concentrated along Colorado’s Front Range and Eastern Plains, the southern half of Nebraska, western Kansas, central Oklahoma and northern and central Texas. Maricopa County in Arizona also ranked highly.
Drilling down to the dozen counties that ranked highest in terms of hail damage risk, four were on Colorado’s Front Range. They included Arapahoe County, which ranked second to Dallas County, Texas; Denver County at No. 4; Jefferson County at No. 9 and Adams County at No. 12, according to Roof Gnome.
Pueblo, El Paso, Yuma, and Larimer counties all made the top 100, noteworthy given there are 3,242 counties in the U.S. Of Colorado’s 64 counties, 20 made the list of areas most vulnerable to hail damage.
The study looked at three factors including the financial risk involved, the vulnerability of structures and an incident scale, which looked at the number of people in a given area searching the Internet using hail damage-related terms.
Last year there were nearly 7,000 hail events, which was 2,500 more than the number reported in 2022, according to Roof Gnome.
Hail storms can tear up roofs, break windows, rip up siding, smash gutters, clobber HVAC systems and cause flooding when storm drains get clogged. For people and animals caught out in the open, they can cause injuries and even death.
Increasingly, they are also shattering expensive solar panels, which is becoming a costly issue in Colorado. Four Colorado counties at high risk for hail damage were also among the top 10 counties in the U.S. for rooftop solar installations, Roof Gnome found.
While some solar panels are designed to withstand ice pellets, none are impenetrable, especially when hailstones are the size of golf balls or larger. Some households may install solar panels to lessen the impacts of climate change, only to find the more severe storms that climate change is fostering are shattering those systems.
Hail often accompanies tornadoes, and Colorado ranks high when it comes to wind damage as well, but not as much as it does for hail damage, according to a second Roof Gnome study.
The study didn’t rank areas by the number of tornadoes or high wind events or wind speeds. Rather it looked at the risk of financial damage when severe windstorms did occur.
Of the 904 U.S. counties most susceptible to wind-related damage, Colorado has six in the top 100. They included Denver at 14th place, Jefferson at 42nd, El Paso at 43rd, Arapahoe at 55th, Weld at 80th and Boulder at 100th.
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