El Paso Took 1.75-Inch Hail Friday. The Roofs Under It Were Replaced After the Last Storm in 2009.
A warned cell crossed central and east El Paso on the evening of October 23 with ping-pong stones and a 1.75-inch report near Fort Bliss. Why a once-a-generation hail city is a different kind of lead market, why the 2009 re-roof wave matters more than the stone size, and the Texas rules before a crew goes out.
El Paso is not a hail town. The city averages a handful of severe hail reports a year, most of them on the desert edges, and the last storm anyone there remembers was September 16, 2009. Friday changed that for a few square miles of the city.
A severe thunderstorm warning went up at 5:36 PM on October 23 calling for 60 mph gusts and ping-pong hail. A second warning for central and east El Paso, Fort Bliss included, raised that to two-inch stones. The hail arrived between about 5:55 and 6:20 PM, which is rush hour on Interstate 10 and warmups for Friday night football.
What was reported
Sizes below are spotter and public reports relayed through NWS El Paso and the Storm Prediction Center. Radar-estimated sizes for the same cell will differ, and our radar-versus-spotter check explains by how much.
| When (MDT) | Where | Reported |
|---|---|---|
| Fri 10-23, 5:55 PM | Near UTEP, west-central El Paso | 1.00 in |
| Fri 10-23, 6:00 PM | 2 to 4 mi S of Fort Bliss, central El Paso | 1.00 in at three spots, 1.75 in at one |
| Fri 10-23, about 6:20 PM | Fort Bliss | Ping-pong size |
| Fri 10-23, evening | Austin High School, central El Paso | Field blanketed white before kickoff |
| Fri 10-23, evening | Near Cielo Vista Mall, east-central El Paso | Hail reported, size not measured |
| Sat 10-24, 4:38 PM | 3 mi S of Canutillo, upper valley | 1.00 in |
KVIA's forecasters noted that radar suggested stones up to hen-egg size in the strongest cell, with no confirmation on the ground. Hail and runoff snarled I-10 through downtown. Saturday's round brought less hail and a lot more water: the city evacuated 16 homes in the Enchanted Hills area of west El Paso after a reservoir overflowed, and crews pulled a driver from a flooded car on South Desert Boulevard.
Read that table the way a roofer should. The measured stones are modest, one inch to 1.75 inches. But they fell over the densest part of the city, on the hottest kind of roof for a claim, and on homeowners who have not seen a hailstone since the Obama administration.
2009 is the whole story
The September 16, 2009 storm was two supercells. The second one formed almost directly over El Paso International Airport a little before 4 PM and dropped golf-ball hail along I-10 through the east side during rush hour. NWS El Paso puts the damage at over 150 million dollars and calls it the costliest hailstorm in the city's history. The Insurance Council of Texas counted about 10,000 damaged homes and 20,000 vehicles, with the average home claim around 6,500 dollars.
Ten thousand roofs went on in the 12 months after that storm. They are 16 and 17 years old today. Then Friday's cell tracked over the same central and east side corridor.
That is the opposite of the situation we described for Phoenix last week, where roofs replaced after the 2010 storm are 14 years old and mostly a repair. A 17-year-old three-tab or builder-grade architectural shingle in the El Paso sun is brittle, has lost granules, and is one storm from the end. One-inch hail on a five-year roof is an argument with an adjuster. One-inch hail on a 2009 roof is usually a replacement, and our stone size by shingle type post walks through why.
So the lead filter in El Paso is not the stone size first. It is the roof year first.
Which homes are the leads
El Paso's roof stock splits in two. The older central, west side and lower valley neighborhoods carry a lot of flat and low-slope roofs: built-up, modified bitumen, and elastomeric coatings over stucco houses. The east side and northeast subdivisions built from the 1980s on, the ones in and around ZIP 79936, are mostly pitched asphalt shingle. Friday's cell crossed both.
Flat roofs under one-inch hail rarely produce a replacement claim. Cracked coating, punctured cap sheet and crushed gravel are real, but they are usually scoped as repairs. The replacement claims are on the pitched shingle roofs, and the best of those are the ones that went on in late 2009 and 2010.
Run the funnel the same way we do for a Colorado swath. Illustrative numbers for the central and east El Paso cell:
| Step | Homes |
|---|---|
| Single-family homes under the radar-estimated 1 in or larger swath | 14,000 |
| Pitched shingle roofs, not flat or low-slope | 8,500 |
| Roof built or replaced 12 or more years ago | 4,200 |
| Owner-occupied, not a rental or vacant | 3,000 |
Fourteen thousand doors is two months of knocking for a six-person crew. Three thousand is two weeks. Within the 3,000, the 2009 and 2010 re-roofs sit at the top, because the roof is tired, the homeowner has filed a hail claim before and knows the drill, and the carrier's depreciation schedule on a 17-year roof is already most of the way to zero, which is why the ACV check timeline matters more here than the stone.
One El Paso-specific filter to add: Fort Bliss. The 1.75-inch report is just south of the post, and thousands of homes in that corridor are military families and rentals with high turnover. Owner-occupancy sorts those out in seconds. A door knock sorts them out in a month.
The Texas rules before a crew goes out
El Paso is a Texas city, so the Texas rulebook applies, with one local twist.
- No state roofing license, but a city permit. Texas has no state roofing license. A re-roof in El Paso needs a city permit, and the contractor pulling it has to be registered with Planning and Inspections. Confirm the registration before the first contract, the same way Fort Worth or Colorado Springs make you do it.
- The deductible is a crime to waive. Texas Insurance Code Chapter 707 makes "we'll cover your deductible" a Class B misdemeanor, and the contract has to say so. Our contract rules post has the language.
- Two no-call lists. The federal registry plus the Texas No-Call List, scrubbed separately. The 915 area code fits in the free five on the federal side; the state list is 75 dollars a quarter. Details in the Do Not Call guide.
- Check the deductible before you pitch. Many Texas policies now carry a 1 percent or 2 percent wind and hail deductible. On a 250,000-dollar east-side house that is 2,500 to 5,000 dollars before the carrier pays, and a 17-year roof with an ACV settlement may not clear it. The 2 percent deductible playbook covers which doors still pencil.
None of this is legal advice. Check the city code and the policy before the first knock.
The 90-day plan
- This week: pull the homes under the radar-estimated one-inch-and-up swath in central and east El Paso, sorted by roof year. Knock the 2009 and 2010 re-roofs first, then anything older.
- Next two weeks: work the rest of the pitched-shingle ring. Flat roofs get a free inspection and a repair quote, not a claim pitch.
- November through January: El Paso homeowners have no habit of calling a roofer after hail. The ones who ignored the first pass notice stains after the next rain. The second pass through the core is cheaper than the first.
El Paso has 17 years of roofing crews who have never worked a hail swath in their own city. The crew that sorts Friday's homes by roof year on Monday morning gets the best of a storm that may not come back for another decade.
How we handle it
We score every home under a swath the same way in El Paso County as in Denver or Fort Worth: radar-estimated stone size within 1.5 miles of the roof, roof year from the county appraisal district, owner-occupancy, and the Do Not Call flag on every phone number that comes back. The morning list after a storm like Friday's is the 3,000 homes, not the 14,000, with the oldest roofs on top.
Run your crew's numbers for a swath like this through the cost-per-job calculator. Our Texas territories cover Dallas-Fort Worth, Central Texas, Lubbock, Amarillo, Abilene and Midland-Odessa today, one roofer per city at a flat price on the pricing page. El Paso is not on the map yet. If you want it, say so in the "Not listed?" form on the territories page. The first roofer who asks is the first roofer we call.
One roofer per city. Real leads from real storms.
Exclusive Colorado territories with NOAA-verified storm scoring and TCPA-compliant outreach data.
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