Nobody Door-Knocks a Wind Storm. San Antonio Just Hit 77 mph.

On the evening of Friday, August 28, a thunderstorm collapsed over Bexar County and did something a lot of roofers still don't have a playbook for. San Antonio International measured a peak gust of 77 mph. Near Lackland, the National Weather Service put gusts around 80 mph based on radar and the damage on the ground. No tornado — straight-line winds, likely microburst-enhanced. Roughly 100,000 CPS Energy customers lost power, and NWS damage surveys ran a corridor from northeast Bexar through central San Antonio into the southwest side: trees down, fences flattened, power poles snapped, roofs damaged.

Now count the roofing crews who built a canvass route off that storm. In most markets, close to zero.

That's not laziness. It's a habit. Storm chasing in this industry was built around hail, and hail comes with a prop — you can hold a stone up on a doorstep, you can point at a dented gutter apron, you can pull a hail map. Wind gives you none of that. So a 77 mph event rolls through a metro of 1.5 million people, tears shingles off a corridor twenty miles long, and the industry treats it as a power-outage story.

What the scoring actually says about wind

We rebuilt storm severity into a continuous scale this month, and the wind side of it is the part worth showing a roofer.

Every lead gets a storm-severity number from 0–30. Hail and wind each map onto that same 0–30 scale, and the lead takes the worse of the two. Here's where the anchors sit:

Read the last row twice. A 75 mph gust scores the same severity as a 2.5-inch stone. The San Antonio event maxed that scale out across a corridor, and it did it on a night when the hail reports were unremarkable.

Now flip to Colorado, where the pattern shows up inverted. On August 26 the Denver metro caught a warned storm carrying 60 mph winds and quarter-size hail across Arvada, Aurora, Centennial and Denver — a warning footprint covering about 1.65 million people. August 30 put 60 mph gusts into Boulder and Clear Creek counties. September 6 did it again in west-central Weld.

Score those the way a hail chaser would and you get nothing. Quarter-size hail is 0.25 inches; on our scale that's a 3. Functionally a zero. Nobody re-roofs a house over quarter hail and nobody should pretend otherwise.

Score the same storm on wind and it's a 22. Same street, same night, same radar file — one signal says skip it and the other says it's a real lead. If your list only reads hail, you didn't just underrate that storm. You never saw it.

Wind damage doesn't sit where hail damage sits

The second thing that trips crews up is geometry, and it changes how you build the route.

Hail cores are tight. A home sitting under the cell takes the full stone; a home four miles out took something much smaller, even though both addresses fall inside the same warning polygon. Our model decays hail magnitude away from the cell with a 2.5-mile scale for exactly that reason — the old approach handed a parcel eight miles from the core the core's hail size, which is how you end up sending a crew to a street that never got hit.

Wind fields are broader. Downburst and outflow damage spreads along a corridor instead of concentrating in a core, so wind decays on a 5-mile scale — double the hail kernel. Practically:

• A hail route is a cluster. Tight, dense, a few subdivisions deep. You work it door to door.
• A wind route is a line. It follows the storm's track, it's longer and thinner, and the damage is streakier — one block stripped, the next block fine, because downbursts touch down in patches.

Crews that canvass a wind event like a hail event burn the morning. You don't grid it. You drive the corridor, and you let the damage tell you which blocks to stop on.

The part that actually sells: wind damage is easier to document

Here's the argument to make to a homeowner, and it's a genuinely stronger one than most hail pitches.

Hail damage is a bruise. It's soft, it's arguable, and adjusters and roofers fight about whether a mat fracture is functional damage or cosmetic granule loss. That fight is why so many hail claims die at ACV or get scoped as repair.

Wind damage is mechanical. Creased shingles, lifted tabs with broken seal strips, missing shingles outright, torn ridge cap, displaced flashing, fence and tree damage on the same property corroborating the event. It's photographable and it's hard to characterize as cosmetic — a shingle is either sealed down or it isn't.

That does not mean wind claims are easy money, and two things still bite:

The deductible is the same one. In Texas it's the wind/hail deductible, and North Texas moved from 1% to 2% of the dwelling limit this year. A $400,000 home is $8,000 out of pocket before the carrier pays anything, whether the cause was a stone or an 80 mph gust. A few creased shingles on one slope is a repair, not a claim, and it stays under that number. We ran the full deductible math in the Texas 2% playbook.

Roof age still decides the settlement. A carrier's depreciation schedule doesn't care about the peril. An 18-year roof with an ACV endorsement settles the same disappointing way after a downburst as it does after hail — which is why roof age belongs in the filter alongside storm severity, not after it.

General information, not legal or insurance advice. The homeowner's own policy language governs.

Wind-led markets accumulate

One more thing hail chasers miss. In markets like Austin and Baltimore County, no single wind event is a season-maker — but the damaging days stack. A roof that took 55 mph in May, 60 in July and 65 in August has been worked three times, and the seal-strip failures compound even where no single day produced a headline.

So we count distinct days with roof-damaging weather at that parcel — 0.75-inch hail or larger, 50 mph wind or higher, or a tornado track — rather than treating one long storm as several events. It's a fatigue signal, and it's why a wind-led metro can carry strong leads through a year with no memorable hail day at all.

What to do with the rest of September

Front Range wind season doesn't end when hail season does; the September 6 Weld County storm is the proof. And the San Antonio corridor is three weeks fresh, well inside the claim window, and largely unworked.

The filter is the same three fields it always is, just with the wind column turned on: storm severity — worse of hail or wind — roof age, and the homeowner's funding path. All our figures are radar-estimated from federal data, which tells you where a claim is plausible, not what an adjuster will conclude standing on the roof. That's still your job.

If you hold a RoofLeads territory, sort your list by wind severity this week and look at what surfaces — for a lot of Colorado and Texas cities it'll be addresses that never showed up on a hail-only list. If your city is still open, check the map — one roofer per city gets it. See what's fallen near you on the Colorado hail map or the Central Texas map, run the numbers on cost per job, and read the Texas compliance field guide before you dial anybody.