DENVER — Several neighborhoods across the Denver metro woke up to broken windshields, damaged roofs and other impacts after a large hailstorm late Thursday night.
Particularly impacted were Green Valley Ranch residents.
"Big chaos, leaves, branches everywhere," said Angel Villanueva, who was busy cleaning up his yard on Friday morning. "There’s a lot of vehicle damage, roof damage, you see a lot of roofers passing by."
Villanueva, who owns a rental property in the neighborhood, said he was alerted by his guests that his home had been damaged.
"I came first thing to assess the situation and fix it until we get it sorted out," said Villanueva.
When he arrived to his house — he found that his roof had been impacted.
"I saw damage at the very top, you can see some indents because of the hail," he said, "I did something temp[orary], until we get it sorted out with the insurance."
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It all made for an extremely busy day for roofing companies — like AVI Roofing.
"Fifty plus calls right away. The calls keep coming in, it’s our job to prioritize where to go first," said Eric Lupher, who works for AVI's business development. "When a big storm comes through like this, it's like all hands on deck for roofers."
He said crews will be working around the clock for the next several weeks to assess and repair damages.
"This is our busy season when big events come through. We know we have to work overtime; this is personal for people, this is their home, where they live — and we do whatever we can to take care of them as best we can," added Lupher.
The hailstorm also caused Green Valley Elementary school to have to cancel classes on Friday due to extensive damage to the campus, including classroom flooding and roof damage.
Scott Pribble, the Director of External Communications for Denver Public Schools (DPS), said they discovered the damage about an hour before school was supposed to start Friday morning.
"Because of the early start time here, it was a late notification for parents, not something we like to do. We like to try give them as much notice as possible but unfortunately, due to extenuating circumstances it wasn’t possible, we didn’t know there was damage until staff arrived here this morning, so we appreciate our parents being able to quickly pivot to having to find daycare resources or stay at home, whatever they had to do to keep the kids home today, but it was something unavoidable," said Pribble.
He said restoration crews are working hard to ensure the school is back open on Monday, in time for their continuation ceremonies.
Pribble said no other DPS schools were impacted by the storm.
"I want to thank our contractors for responding quickly so that we do only lose one day of school and for getting school back together so we can be back Monday," said Pribble.
