The First 24 Hours After a Central Texas Hail Storm: What to Do Before You File
When a hail storm rolls through Central Texas, what you do in the first day matters more than most homeowners realize. This is a step-by-step guide to the exact documentation a HAAG-certified inspector looks for, so you can walk into the conversation with your insurance carrier holding the evidence, not guessing at it.
What You'll Learn
Central Texas sees several significant hail events every year. If you own a home in Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park, or anywhere in the hill country, the question isn't whether your roof will take hail this season. It's how prepared you'll be when it does.
The first 24 hours after the storm are your documentation window. What you do in that window sets the tone for every conversation you'll have with your insurance carrier afterward, and it determines whether you walk into those conversations with a clear picture of what's on your roof or just a best guess.
Here's exactly what a HAAG-certified inspector does in the first 24 hours, and how you can do most of it yourself with a phone camera, a flashlight, and a stepladder.
The First Hour: Safety First, Then the Phone Camera
Central Texas hail events can last 10 to 30 minutes, and falling ice, wind-blown debris, and hidden roof damage all make the first hour the most dangerous time to go outside. Start indoors. Work through this short checklist before you ever step out the back door.
Stay Inside Until the Storm Fully Passes
Wait for the radar to clear and the wind to calm before stepping outside. Hail can keep falling for several minutes after the loudest part of the storm ends. Listen for the sound on your roof to stop completely.
Walk the Interior First
Check every ceiling in the house for new water spots or discoloration. Listen at the attic access for any dripping. Interior damage is the single clearest signal that your roof was compromised, and it's the fastest check you can run.
Wide Shots Before Closeups
Once it's safe to step outside, take wide photos of the whole house from all four sides before you focus in on any specific damage. Your carrier wants to see context, not just damage. Time stamps on phone photos are your friend here.
Do Not Walk the Roof
We see homeowners climb up after every storm. Please don't. Wet shingles are slippery, hail-damaged decking can be soft or unstable, and a fall from a two-story roof is a life-changing injury. A HAAG-certified inspector has the safety gear and training to do this for you.
The Five Documentation Spots (and the One Most Homeowners Skip)
Once it's safe to be outside, there are five places a HAAG-certified inspector photographs first. You can cover most of them with a phone and a stepladder. The fifth one is the attic check, and it's the most commonly skipped step in the whole process.
The Gutters and Downspouts
Look inside the gutters for loose asphalt granules and check at the bottom of every downspout for a small pile of granules on the ground. Granules are the protective layer on your shingles. If they're in the gutter, they are no longer on the roof.
The Yard and Driveway
Photograph any remaining hail stones before they melt. Use a ruler, a quarter, or a coin for scale. Central Texas hail ranges from pea-sized to baseball-sized, and the size directly affects the severity of the damage on your roof. A photographed hail stone is evidence that a storm of that magnitude hit your address.
Ground-Level Roof Views from All Four Sides
Stand back from each side of the house and photograph the full roof from the ground. Look for lifted shingle edges, dark patches where the granule layer is stripped, missing shingles entirely, and any debris caught in valleys. You can do this with a phone zoom in about 10 minutes.
Window Screens, AC Condensers, and Soft Metal
Check for dimples on window screens and the aluminum fins on the outdoor AC condenser unit. Check garage doors, vinyl siding, and mailbox surfaces for dents. This is called "collateral damage" in the industry, and it's a reliable proxy for roof impact. If the soft metal at ground level has hail damage, the roof almost certainly took hits too.
The Attic Check (Most Skipped, Highest Value)
Grab a flashlight and a stepladder. Open your attic access. Look at the underside of the roof decking for any new water stains, dark patches, or wet insulation. Look for daylight coming through where it shouldn't. Wind-driven hail can punch through underlayment while leaving the outside of the roof looking mostly fine, and water will track down a rafter for feet before it ever shows up as a ceiling stain. This is the single highest-value five minutes you can spend in the first 24 hours, and almost nobody does it.
What Documentation Your Carrier Actually Works From
Every insurance carrier runs their own claim process, and the specific paperwork varies. But the common thread across every carrier we've worked with is simple: the more organized and professionally-documented your evidence is when you start the conversation, the smoother everything downstream gets. Your carrier's adjuster is trained to read forensic-grade inspection reports. When you hand them one at the start of the process, everyone is working from the same document, and the back-and-forth gets shorter.
Here's what a complete first-24-hour documentation package looks like:
A Dated Photo Timeline
Storm-in-progress photos if you took any, wide exterior shots, closeups of visible damage, hail-stone-with-ruler photos, gutter granule photos. Every photo time-stamped by your phone.
Interior Damage Notes
Any new ceiling spots, water stains, or drips you found on the interior walkthrough. Photograph them, note the room, and note the time you found them.
A HAAG-Certified Inspection Report
This is the part you hire out. A HAAG-certified inspector walks the roof, documents every impact, measures hail bruising, and produces a forensic-grade report. That report is what your carrier's adjuster is trained to read.
The Storm Date and Time
Note the exact date and approximate time the storm passed through your address. Your carrier will verify this against official weather data, and having it ready at the start of the call saves time.
A quick note on the order of operations: a HAAG-certified inspection isn't a commitment to file a claim. It's information. You can get a free inspection, sit with the report for a few days, and then decide whether filing is the right move. The report belongs to you. What you do with it is your call.
The 5 Most Common 24-Hour Mistakes
After years of post-storm inspections across Central Texas, we see the same handful of mistakes come up in almost every conversation with a homeowner who wishes they had done something differently. Here are the five we see most often.
Mistake #1: Walking the Roof Yourself
The Problem: Wet shingles are slippery. Hail-damaged decking can be soft underfoot. Homeowner injuries from roof falls after storms are a documented risk. And the damage you'll find from walking around is almost always less complete than what a trained inspector would catch.
The Solution: Stay on the ground. Use your phone zoom. Schedule a free HAAG-certified inspection and let a trained professional handle the roof walk.
Mistake #2: Only Photographing Visible Exterior Damage
The Problem: Hail damage is mostly invisible from ground level. A shingle can be structurally compromised by a hail impact while looking intact from 30 feet away. If your documentation only covers what you can see from the driveway, you're documenting the smallest portion of the story.
The Solution: Do the attic check. Check the gutters for granules. Photograph the soft-metal collateral damage. These are the clues that tell the full story, and they're all reachable without getting on the roof.
Mistake #3: Skipping the Attic Check
The Problem: Water can track along a rafter for several feet before it ever shows up as a ceiling stain. By the time you see damage on an interior ceiling, it has often been there for weeks or months. That delay complicates the causation question with your carrier.
The Solution: A flashlight and a stepladder. Five minutes. Look at the underside of the roof decking, the insulation around roof penetrations, and around any vents or chimneys. If anything looks damp, photograph it and note the date.
Mistake #4: Hiring the First Door-to-Door Contractor Who Shows Up
The Problem: Storm-chaser contractors follow the weather. They knock doors the day after a hail event, offer to handle everything, and frequently vanish after a deposit or a poorly-done install. Central Texas homeowners lose real money to this pattern every season.
The Solution: Before hiring any roofer after a storm, ask for proof of general liability insurance, proof of workers' compensation coverage, a local physical address you can drive to, references from Central Texas customers, and any third-party certifications like HAAG or RCAT. If any of those are missing or vague, keep looking.
Mistake #5: Calling Your Carrier Before You Have Documentation
The Problem: Once you open a claim with your carrier, a clock starts. The more organized your evidence package is at the start of that conversation, the smoother everything downstream goes. Homeowners who call first and document second often end up scrambling to fill in gaps while the clock is running.
The Solution: Do the walkthrough, get the HAAG-certified inspection report, collect your photo timeline, and then make the call. Walking in with an organized package means the conversation is productive from the first minute.
Get a Free HAAG-Certified Inspection
If a hail storm hit your Central Texas home in the last 24 hours, or the last 24 days, we can walk your roof and hand you a forensic-grade report you can bring to your carrier. No pressure. No sales push. Just the documentation you need to have a productive conversation.
HAAG-certified inspectors • Forensic-grade reports • 7 days a week during storm season • Free
The best outcome after a Central Texas hail storm isn't the one where you get lucky. It's the one where you walk into every conversation with your carrier holding the same forensic-grade documentation their adjuster is trained to read.
The first 24 hours are your window to build that documentation. Most of it you can do yourself with a phone camera, a flashlight, and a stepladder. The parts you can't, we handle for free as part of a HAAG-certified inspection.
Save this page. The next Central Texas hail storm is a matter of when, not if.