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The engineer’s report I read today concluded, as follows:  “There was no functional damage due to hail observed on any of the roofs on the buildings at the subject property.  If hail occurred at the subject property, it did not have sufficient size, density, or speed to cause functional damage to the roof covering.”

My first reading of this conclusion sent up a red flag as I read “If hail occurred at the subject property …” since the report contained weather data showing that hail greater than 1.25″ had fallen at the site of the fifteen-year-old shingled roof on the date of loss and observations of hail dents were reported on all metals on and surrounding the roof.  How could “if hail occurred” even be a factor in a conclusion about the damage clearly reported to be caused by it, I wondered.  Then I began to look deeper.

My second reading of the report was an intense search for any mention of the engineer’s measurement or calculation of the density of the hailstones that he knew to have struck the roof or a determination of the distance or angle of their descent.  There was none.  Without that, how could the engineer, who had now come to question “if” hail had struck the roofing materials, conclude that the hail was known to have lacked the density or speed to cause damage?

I checked my files and found three other reports written by the same engineer from other claims I had represented.  Like this one, all of them were written at the request of an insurance company and all of them concluded the same absence of “observed” damage to the roof.  Oddly, however, each of the four reports stated the exact same conclusion in the exact same words – verbatim.

2017 – “There was no functional damage due to hail observed on any of the roofs on the buildings at the subject property.  If hail occurred at the subject property, it did not have sufficient size, density, or speed to cause functional damage to the roof covering.”

2020 – “There was no functional damage due to hail observed on any of the roofs on the buildings at the subject property.  If hail occurred at the subject property, it did not have sufficient size, density, or speed to cause functional damage to the roof covering.”

2021 – “There was no functional damage due to hail observed on any of the roofs on the buildings at the subject property.  If hail occurred at the subject property, it did not have sufficient size, density, or speed to cause functional damage to the roof covering.”

2021 – “There was no functional damage due to hail observed on any of the roofs on the buildings at the subject property.  If hail occurred at the subject property, it did not have sufficient size, density, or speed to cause functional damage to the roof covering.”

Not one of these narratives was supported with information as to how or if the density and speed of the hailstones were measured by the engineer to conclude their insufficiency to cause damage.  Nor did they report the direction of the storm, the angle at which the hailstones struck the roofing materials, the speed or direction of the wind at the time of the storm, or other relevant data required for scientific analysis of hail damage.  In other words, if one were to remove the boilerplate language apparently common to all of his reports, nothing appeared in the narrative that required an engineer to cite.  The same ambiguous and noncommital descriptions could have been just as easily written by a shingle salesman with poor marketing skills.

Last, but certainly not least, please pay special attention as to how this carefully worded boilerplate conclusion did not say there was no damage to the roof caused by hail.  Instead, the engineer simply stated that based only on his powers of observation, he didn’t see it.   

Could it be that these conclusions, like the language used to communicate them, had been predetermined prior to the inspection?

Copyright 2021, James H. Bushart, Licensed Adjuster LLC

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