A term of the claim

Segregation of damages

The separating of damage a policy covers from damage it does not, and the burden, usually the policyholder's, of showing how much is which.

Definition

Related pages: 5
Last revised: 23 August 2026

Segregation of damages is the task of dividing the loss on a property into the part a policy covers and the part it does not: the hail from the claimed storm apart from the hail of an earlier one, storm damage apart from wear, deterioration and prior repair. Where covered and excluded causes have both contributed, most courts hold that the policyholder must offer evidence from which a jury can allocate the loss, and a claim that cannot be allocated at all may recover nothing.

The doctrine goes by different names and has different edges from state to state. Some courts require a reasonable basis for the allocation rather than precision; some permit the insurer's own estimate to do the work; some apply an anti-concurrent-causation clause so that any excluded cause defeats the whole. In every version, the first step is factual: which storms are on record near the property, on which dates, and with what on record for each.

That is the step the weather record answers and the only one it answers. It does not say which dent came from which day, and nothing in it speaks to wear. It says what the candidates are, ranked by how well they are attested, so that an inspection can be read against a dated list rather than against a guess.

In the report

How the document prints it

The report gives segregation its dates. Each storm day inside the window is a finding with its own date, its own largest measurement and its own confidence, and each record in the table is dated as its source published it; a reader allocating damage between two storms reads the two days side by side, with the measured figures set apart from the detected ones. The document states that no opinion is offered on the cause, extent or cost of any damage, which is exactly the line segregation requires it to hold: the allocation is the engineer's and the adjuster's, and the dated record is what they allocate against.

From the record

Where segregation has the longest list to work from

Hail days on record: 63
Largest size on record: 4.00″
Counted within: 10 mi

Colorado Springs, CO carries 63 hail days on record within 10 mi of its centre, the largest 4.00″. A claim there segregates one day's damage from the rest of that list, and the list is what the record supplies.

Measured Detected, not measured

The page these figures come from

The terms this page uses and the guides that go further. Each is shown against its own example from the record.

Term Prior storm
An earlier storm that reached the same property before the one a claim is about, and the usual reason a hail claim is disputed.
Term Functional damage
Damage that shortens the service life or impairs the water-shedding of a roof covering, as distinct from damage to its appearance.
Term Cosmetic damage exclusion
A policy endorsement that removes coverage for hail or wind damage that changes how a roof looks without changing how it works.
Term Date of loss
The calendar date a claim says the damage occurred, which the storm record either holds a report for or does not.
Guide Which storm caused it: attributing damage across several storm days
Most roofs in the hail belt have been under more than one storm, and a claim is rarely argued against a blank record. It is argued against the other days: the one before the policy began, the one the last carrier paid, the one nobody noticed. This guide sets out what the law asks when storms compete for the same damage, how an appraisal panel reads the record, and why the calendar has to be on the table before the argument starts.

Sources

The primary references. Each opens on the agency's own site.

The next step

The glossary defines the word. The report is what uses it.

Everything above is definition: what the word means in the document, and what it does not. None of it says what reached one roof.

Run the address and the archive is searched at the property: the storm, the date, the measured size, the distance and bearing from the roof, and the federal record each figure came from, in a document that states its own method. About a minute.

Suggestions by Google

First reports free
No card required
Ready in a minute

How this page is made

The text: Written by the editors and last revised 23 August 2026. It explains the record and how the report reads it; it contains no figure of its own.
The example: Drawn from the archive when the page was compiled, 24 August 2026, and rebuilt daily as the record deepens. Every figure in the panel marked From the record is computed, not written, and links to the page it came from.
Measured and detected: A report from a person or an instrument is measured. A radar-derived size is detected, not measured, and is marked as such, here and in every document we issue. The two are never added together.
What this is not: A definition of a word the report uses. It is not a report on any property, and it states no opinion about one. The coverage page states what the record holds, by kind and by year.

About this record

Everything here is reproduced from public federal and volunteer weather records, as the agencies and observer networks that publish them released it. Titan Weather compiles the record; it does not observe the weather, and it is not affiliated with any source it cites.

No archive holds everything. Storms cross places where nobody is standing, instruments and spotters cover some areas better than others, sources revise their records, and recent reports can take weeks to arrive and settle. Where this page shows nothing, nothing was found in the sources searched, within the period and area it states. That is not a finding that no weather occurred.

These pages describe the public record near a place or on a date. They do not establish what reached any particular property, and nothing here is insurance, legal or engineering advice.