You came outside on a Tuesday morning to leaves all over the driveway and a fresh dent in the downspout, and by lunchtime you were reading a county storm report trying to work out whether the roof took something. Most people here start exactly there. It's a record with a hard edge to it, though, and knowing where that edge falls saves worry in both directions: the storm you're sure about may have missed you, and the one you didn't think about may be the one that did the work.
What the county's four-year file holds
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a storm events database, and the rolling window for Johnson County, Kansas covering 2023 through 2026 holds 12 separate hail days and 83 reports of hail at 1.00 inch or larger. The largest stone in the file measured 3.50 inches, on March 13, 2024. The strongest wind in it reached 89 mph, on July 14, 2023.
Two things about those headline figures before you carry them anywhere, because they're the ones that travel. The 3.50 inch report came in around Wilder and the 89 mph reading came in around Monticello, and both of those sit elsewhere in Johnson County. They describe what this county's worst four years produced. That isn't a statement about an Overland Park street, and anybody who hands them to you as though it were is describing the county while pointing at your house.
The rows with Overland Park's name on them
The more useful half of the same file is the smaller half: the reports observers logged under Overland Park or under Stanley. That's the short list, and it is the one worth reading twice.
- March 10, 2026. Hail at 1.00 inch logged at Overland Park. That same date produced three separate 1.00 inch reports at Stanley.
- June 26, 2025. Wind at 60 mph, four reports across Overland Park.
- June 3, 2025. Wind at 60 mph, two reports.
- May 19, 2025. Wind at 60 mph and hail at 1.00 inch at Overland Park, with 63 mph and 60 mph readings logged at Stanley on the same date.
- May 25, 2024. Wind at 60 mph at Stanley.
The ordinary storms are the ones doing the work
There's nothing spectacular in that list, and that is exactly why it's worth putting in front of you. The weather that reaches roofs in this city is mostly this: one-inch stones and sixty-mile-an-hour winds, several times a season, year after year. Coverings here don't usually fail on one unforgettable afternoon. They fail on the tenth ordinary one, and the tenth ordinary one never makes the news or leaves a photograph anybody kept.
It matters just as much that hail is fussy about blocks. A dated county row proves a storm crossed the county; it can't prove the storm crossed your street. One cell will lay 1.00 inch stones down one side of a road and leave the far side dry, which is why two neighbors can give completely different accounts of the same twenty minutes and both be telling the truth.
So a 1.00 inch stone that landed on your roof matters more to you than a 3.50 inch stone that fell across the county the same afternoon. The big figure travels. The small one was over your head.
It runs the other direction too, and that's the half that rarely gets said out loud. A busy county file doesn't mean your covering was damaged. Plenty of Overland Park roofs sat through every date on that list and came out with nothing wrong at all.
What hail does to a roof that still looks fine
Hail doesn't usually punch through an asphalt roof. What it does is knock granules loose, and those granules are the covering's sunscreen. Where they're gone, the mat underneath starts aging faster than the rest of the roof around it. Hail also bruises shingles without breaking the surface, and a bruise is a soft spot somebody finds by pressing on it. You won't see it from a ladder.
So the visible damage and the expensive damage aren't the same thing. A roof can lose years of service life to a storm that left it looking identical from the driveway. Hail and wind damage is its own kind of repair for that reason: what needs attention is spread thin over the whole roof, and there's no one obvious place to point at.
How to use the record, and where to stop using it
The file is good for one thing above all, and it's a big one: dates. A date is what an insurance conversation runs on, and it is what tells a roofer which slopes to check first. If the damage turns out to be there and recent, this becomes an insurance question quickly, and the date you pulled out of the county file is the first thing anybody will ask you for.
Per this county's own four-year record, the dated hail and wind events fall between March and September, with nothing logged at all in December, January or February. That narrows the window you're searching more than most people expect.
Where the record stops is condition. It can't tell you the state of your covering, and nothing else can either, short of somebody going up there and working across it plane by plane. That's what a roof inspection is for, and it is the least satisfying and most useful sentence in this whole post: somebody has to get on the roof and look.
If one of those dates lines up with something you remember, the next move is somebody on the roof with a camera. An inspection through Overland Park Summit Roofing costs nothing, and you'll keep the photographs and the write-up whether it turns out to be a repair, a replacement, or nothing at all.
Get the roof looked at