A hail claim and a wind claim are two different arguments, and the roof makes them for you if someone knows how to read it. Carriers assess the two perils separately, price them separately in the deductible on many policies, and reject each for a different reason: hail claims fail as “wear and tear,” wind claims fail as “pre-existing.” So the first job on a storm-damaged roof in Eau Claire is not the repair, it is telling the two apart and documenting each in the way an adjuster is trained to accept.
What hail does to an asphalt shingle
Hail hits a shingle straight down at speed, and the damage is an impact fracture in the fiberglass mat under the granules. Up close it reads as a round bruise: a spot where the granules have been knocked loose or pushed into the asphalt, that gives slightly when pressed, the way a bruised apple does. On a fresh strike the exposed asphalt is black and shiny; over the following months it weathers and the surrounding granules keep letting go, which is why hail damage often shows up as a gutter full of grit half a year after the storm.
Distribution is the tell. Hail scatters, so the strikes are random across a slope with no pattern, and they land on every slope, though the side facing the storm’s path takes more and harder hits. Size decides severity: stones under about an inch rarely break a healthy architectural shingle, an inch to an inch and a half bruises depending on the shingle’s age and thickness, and an inch and a half or larger cracks shingles outright. The May 15, 2025 storm put four-inch stones on Altoona, which is the top of that scale.
The corroborating evidence is not on the shingles. Hail dents soft metals, gutters, downspouts, vent caps, the fins on an air-conditioner condenser, and leaves splatter marks on oxidized surfaces like an old grill lid or a painted deck rail. Shingles can be argued about; a dented aluminum downspout cannot. That is why an inspection photographs the gutters before the roof, and why many adjusters count hits inside a marked ten-by-ten-foot test square on each slope, with roughly eight or more per square commonly treated as a damaged slope.
What wind does to a roof
Wind works from the edges in, and it works with direction. The first casualties are the rakes, the eaves, and the ridge caps on the windward slopes, where a gust gets under the shingle edge and lifts it. Once the sealant strip that glues each course to the one below breaks, the tab can crease, tear off along a clean line, or fold back and lie down again. That last case, the creased-but-attached tab, is the one that costs homeowners money: it looks fine from the driveway, it has a horizontal crease across the tab where the mat cracked, and it fails in the next event. A wind inspection walks the windward slopes first and marks every crease before the next front finishes the job.
The pattern is the opposite of hail’s. Wind damage is directional, concentrated on the slopes and edges facing the storm, and it runs in rows where a whole course lost its seal. The April 28, 2025 outbreak left exactly that signature across Eau Claire County: rows of creased tabs on the west- and southwest-facing slopes, most of them still attached.
Shingle grade matters more for wind than for hail. Architectural shingles carry wind ratings of 110 to 130 mph; 3-tab shingles carry 60 to 80, and their sealant strips age out sooner, which is why the rows of lifted tabs after a spring wind event are almost always on older 3-tab roofs. Nail pops, flashing peeled from the same compass direction, and ridge caps torn loose complete the picture.
Metal roofs: dents, cosmetic exclusions, and screw lines
Hail on a standing seam or ribbed steel roof usually dents the panel without breaking its water seal, and that is where policies split. Many carriers write a cosmetic-damage exclusion for metal roofing, meaning dents that do not affect function are not covered; the panel is damaged, the roof still sheds water, and the claim is denied. Read that endorsement before you file. Wind on an exposed-fastener panel roof shows up differently: bent or lifted panels at the gable ends and screw lines that the gust worked loose, both of which are functional damage and claimable.
Reading the roof before the adjuster does
The inspection records each peril in the form its claim needs:
- Soft metals first. Gutters, downspouts, vent caps, the condenser fins. Photographed with a scale reference.
- Test squares on each slope for hail, hits circled in chalk, counted, and photographed, with the slope named and the compass direction noted.
- Windward edges for wind, every crease marked and photographed close enough to show the fracture line, with the storm’s direction recorded.
- Interior evidence, ceiling stains and attic daylight, tied to the roof-level cause.
- Dates. The storm date, the inspection date, and the neighbors’ visible damage, which reinforces that the event was real.
That file is what we hand you and what we walk the adjuster through on the roof. The storm damage page covers the claim process from there.
Repair or replacement, by peril
Hail damage on an otherwise sound roof is usually repairable only when it is light and confined to one slope; bruised mats keep failing, so a slope with a damaged test square is normally replaced and a roof with several is a full replacement. Wind damage runs the other way: a run of lifted tabs on a sound roof is a repair of a few hundred dollars, and replacement enters only when creasing is widespread on an aged roof whose sealant has given up everywhere at once. After hail, the Class 4 impact-rated shingles earn a look, because they resist the next event and discount the wind-and-hail portion of many Wisconsin policies.