‘It Was Nuts’: The Extreme Tests that Show Why Hail Is a Multibillion-Dollar Problem

The costs of a hail damage have ballooned over the past two decades, prompting researchers to resort to extreme measures to understand how these storms destroy buildings.

The scars left on houses look like shotgun blasts, sometimes. In the aftermath of major storms, Andrew Shick, owner and chief executive of Illinois-based firm Roofing USA, has driven through suburbs blasted by hail and been left stunned by the damage.

Earlier this year, he visited a farm complex in western Illinois where roofs, even sturdy metal ones, were left pockmarked and perforated after 3-inch balls of ice fell from the sky. “It was nuts,” he recalls. There were baseball-sized holes in the lawn, even. “I’d never seen that before.”

Shick has been in the roofing business for several years now. He says it feels to him as though hailstorms are getting worse. Certainly, the damage caused by hail is increasingly expensive ...