Storm, wind and water intrusion.

Emergency mitigation is your obligation too

Nearly every policy requires the insured to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. In practice that means tarping the roof and boarding openings before the next front arrives, and keeping receipts for it. Damage that happens because a hole stayed open for a week is where carriers push back hardest, and it is avoidable.

Utah storms cause a specific kind of loss

The canyon wind events that come down the Wasatch — the ones that flip trampolines and take fence sections out along the benches — lift shingles and shear flashing rather than taking a roof off outright. That produces slow intrusion nobody notices until a ceiling stains weeks later. After a wind event, the useful thing is a look at the attic, not just the yard.

Spring runoff and the melt

The bigger seasonal risk here is not a summer thunderstorm, it is the melt. A heavy Wasatch snowpack coming off fast in April and May raises the water table along the valley floor and pushes water into basements and window wells through foundations that were fine all winter. Sump failure during the melt is one of the most common losses we see, and a battery backup on the sump is the cheapest insurance in Utah.

Then the drying

Once the envelope is closed, storm water is treated like any other intrusion — moisture mapping, extraction, structural drying to standard, documentation throughout. Water that came through a roof has usually travelled further inside the assembly than the ceiling stain suggests.