Doctrine
Storm chasing, storm history, and the line between them.
Two postcards can describe the same block in April. One of them asserts a condition on a roof the sender was not permitted to inspect. The other cites a federal weather file by date, county and measurement. Illinois has written down which is which, in three separate acts, and the penalty for getting it wrong attaches to the license as well as the bank account.
653Cook County hail reports on the NOAA recordNOAA SPC
444Of those at 1.00 inch or larger (68.0%)NOAA SPC
27Reports logged in Cook on 4 April 2023, top size 1.75 inNOAA SPC
$50,000Ceiling on a Consumer Fraud Act civil penalty815 ILCS 505/7
01 · The statutes
Three acts land on one postcard.
First, the boring but necessary line: this is journalism about rules, not legal advice. If a campaign you are drafting worries you, that is a conversation for your own attorney. Everything below is statute text as the Illinois General Assembly publishes it, read on 4 August 2026, with the links in the sources block.
The Illinois Roofing Industry Licensing Act (225 ILCS 335) decides whether you may be in the business. Section 9 is blunt about it: "It is unlawful for any person to engage in the business of providing professional roofing services or act in the capacity of or hold himself, herself, or itself out in any manner as a roofing contractor or a qualifying party without having been duly licensed or accepted by the Department under the provisions of this Act." The Department is IDFPR, which takes complaints and publishes enforcement actions.
The Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act (815 ILCS 505) decides what you may say. Section 2 declares unlawful any "false promise, misrepresentation or the concealment, suppression or omission of any material fact" in trade or commerce. The clause a marketer should read twice is the closer: those practices are unlawful "whether any person has in fact been misled, deceived or damaged thereby." No injured homeowner is required. The statement itself is the violation.
Then Section 18 of the Home Repair and Remodeling Act (815 ILCS 513/18), captioned "Repairs following damaging weather." It is the Illinois storm-chaser statute in everything but name, effective 1 January 2012 under Public Act 97-235, and its definition of a catastrophe reaches any "natural occurrence, including but not limited to flood, drought, earthquake, tornado, windstorm, or hailstorm" that damages multiple residences. Hail is named in the text.
The read for contractors
Three statutes, three unrelated failure modes: unlicensed practice, a deceptive statement, and storm-specific conduct. A mailer can clear two of them and still fail the third, and the third is the one written for your season.
What each act reachesilga.gov statute text
| Act | Reaches |
|---|---|
| 225 ILCS 335 | The license itself |
| 815 ILCS 505 | Every statement you publish |
| 815 ILCS 513/18 | Storm work and storm offers |
02 · The contrast
Same roof. Two sentences.
Here is the whole question in miniature. A postcard lands on a block after an April storm.
Version A says an aerial scan picked up damage at the address and a specialist is working the neighborhood this week. Version B says NOAA's Storm Prediction Center logged 27 hail reports across Cook County on 4 April 2023, the largest measured at 1.75 inches, and that homes of a certain vintage inside that footprint are worth a look.
Version A is a factual representation about one specific property. It asserts a condition. Under 815 ILCS 505/2 that assertion has to be true and non-misleading on its own terms, and under 815 ILCS 513/18 a contractor generally may not climb on a roof or inspect for exterior damage without the insured's express permission. So the sentence claims knowledge the sender was mostly not permitted to obtain, about a roof nobody lawfully looked at.
Version B asserts nothing about the property. It cites a federal file, names the county, names the day, names the measurement, and leaves the inference where it belongs. The difference isn't tone. It's who has to prove what.
The read for contractors
Test every line this way: if defending it would require a roof inspection you did not have permission to perform, the copy is doing work your file cannot support. Cut it or cite something instead.
What the copy would have to prove815 ILCS 505/2 · 815 ILCS 513/18
| The line | What must be true |
|---|---|
| Damage at this address | A lawful inspection of that roof |
| Pre-approved for a new roof | An underwriting decision you don't make |
| 27 NOAA reports, Cook, 4 Apr 2023 | The federal record. Published. |
| Pre-1980 homes in this township | The assessor's file. Published. |
03 · The record
What the public file will actually carry for you.
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center archive, as loaded here, holds 12,000 Illinois hail reports running from 3 March 1955 to 27 July 2026. 7,262 of them, 60.5%, recorded stones of one inch or larger, the size class the trade treats as roof-relevant.
653 of those reports fall in Cook County, spread over 244 distinct calendar days. 444, or 68.0%, were an inch or larger; 97 were 1.75 inches or larger; the biggest stone on Cook's record is 2.75 inches, logged on four separate days. And 170 of the 244 report-days carried at least one stone of an inch or more, which is the honest version of the claim that Cook County gets real hail.
The recent record is lumpy, and that lumpiness is what storm marketing usually gets wrong in both directions. Across the ten full years 2016 through 2025, Cook drew 164 reports, 147 of them at an inch or larger. But 2021 produced 2 and 2018 produced 4, against 38 in 2023 and 35 in 2024. The single busiest day on the county's entire record is 4 April 2023, with 27 reports topping out at 1.75 inches. 7 May 2024 logged 18 reports at up to 2.00 inches. 27 February 2024 logged 11, also reaching 2.00 inches, which is a February hailstorm in Cook County and exactly the sort of fact a mailer can print without asserting a thing about anyone's roof.
The read for contractors
Storm history is a citation. Storm chasing is an assertion. Only one of them can be printed, mailed, and then handed to a regulator unchanged.
Cook County hail reports by yearNOAA SPC · 2026 partial
Busiest days on Cook's recordNOAA SPC
| Date | Reports | Max size |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-04-04 | 27 | 1.75" |
| 2003-08-01 | 23 | 1.75" |
| 2010-04-05 | 21 | 2.75" |
| 2026-07-27 | 19 | 1.75" |
| 2024-05-07 | 18 | 2.00" |
04 · The exposure
Where a sentence reaches your license.
The money side is straightforward. Under 815 ILCS 505/7 the Attorney General or a State's Attorney may sue in the name of the People, with a civil penalty "not to exceed $50,000", a penalty "not to exceed $50,000 per violation" where the practice was committed with intent to defraud, and "an additional civil penalty not to exceed $10,000 for each violation" committed against a person 65 or older. Storm work skews old. That last clause is not incidental to this trade.
The licensing side is quieter and worse. Section 9.1 of the Roofing Act lists grounds for disciplinary action, and four of them describe a bad storm mailer with uncomfortable precision: "advertising in any manner that is false, misleading, or deceptive"; "taking undue advantage of a customer, which results in the perpetration of a fraud"; "performing any act or practice that is a violation of the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act"; and "knowingly making any false statement, oral, written, or otherwise, of a character likely to influence, persuade, or induce others."
Read that third one again. A consumer-fraud violation is itself, separately, a ground to discipline the roofing license. One deceptive line buys you both proceedings.
The mechanical requirements are easier and still get missed. Section 5 requires that a roofing contractor advertising services include "the roofing contractor license number and the licensee's name." Getting it wrong is a Class A misdemeanor carrying a "$1,000" fine, and "each day that an advertisement runs" counts as a separate offense. Section 18(d) of the Home Repair Act repeats the requirement across roofing contracts, bids and advertisements. Section 18(b) separately forbids advertising or promising "to pay or rebate all or any portion of any insurance deductible" as an inducement, which retires the single most common storm-season offer in the trade. And Section 20 requires the "Home Repair: Know Your Consumer Rights" pamphlet, plus a signed Consumer Rights Acknowledgment Form, on any home-repair contract over "$1,000".
The read for contractors
Price the downside per impression. A misdemeanor that re-accrues every day an ad runs, sitting on top of a disciplinary ground, makes one sloppy line the most expensive sentence in the campaign.
Statutory exposure815 ILCS 505/7 · 225 ILCS 335/5
| Provision | Ceiling |
|---|---|
| CFA civil penalty | $50,000 |
| CFA, intent to defraud | $50,000 / violation |
| CFA, victim 65+ | +$10,000 / violation |
| Advertising without license no. | $1,000 / day |
05 · The rewrite
Three lines that survive all three acts.
Every figure below was computed for this piece from the NOAA archive, and every one of them is a citation rather than a claim.
"NOAA's Storm Prediction Center logged 27 hail reports across Cook County on 4 April 2023, the largest measured at 1.75 inches." Date, geography, count, measurement, all sitting in a public federal file that a homeowner or a regulator can pull.
"Cook County has 444 hail reports of one inch or larger on the NOAA record since 1955, across 170 separate days." Aggregate, sourced, and it identifies no property at all.
"Homes in this township built before 1980 with no roof permit on file are where the replacement cycle has run longest." A statement about a cohort, drawn from the county assessor and permit records, carrying no condition claim about any address.
What is absent from all three is the word your competitor's postcard opens with: an assertion about the reader's own roof. You do not need it. In a county where hail landed on 244 separate days, the record is the stronger argument, and it stays standing on the morning the claim does not.
The read for contractors
Build the campaign out of records you could hand to IDFPR unedited. Then compliance review is a filing exercise rather than an argument, and your season starts a week earlier than the chaser's.
Cook hail by size classNOAA SPC · n=653
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Method & sources
Hail figures are computed from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center severe-weather archive as loaded into the TerritoryX hail table: 12,000 Illinois reports dated 3 March 1955 through 27 July 2026, assembled from the SPC's 1955–2025 hail file plus the SPC daily storm-report files for 2026. Cook County is county FIPS 31 within state IL. Every report in the table carries a populated hail size, so size percentages use the full report count as the denominator, with no exclusions. Reports dated 2026 come from preliminary daily files and are subject to NOAA revision. A hail report is a report: it records that stones of a stated size were observed at a stated place and time, and it is not a statement about the condition of any building.
Housing-stock references are to the Cook County Assessor's residential property-characteristics file and county building-permit records, the same layers behind the county brief and the township pages. Everything on this page is aggregate. No individual home is identified, and nothing here is a claim about any specific property's condition.
Statutory text was read directly on the Illinois General Assembly's site and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation's site on 4 August 2026. Quotations are from those pages. Statutes change; the General Assembly's database is the current text, and this page is not legal advice.
NOAA SPC · hail archive 1955–2026
Cook County Assessor · characteristics
County permit records · roof permits
ilga.gov · 225 ILCS 335/5, /9, /9.1
ilga.gov · 815 ILCS 505/2, /7
ilga.gov · 815 ILCS 513/18, /20
IDFPR · roofing contractor licensure
Primary sources cited
225 ILCS 335/5, Display of license number; building permits; advertising ·
ilga.gov
225 ILCS 335/9, Licensure requirement ·
ilga.gov
225 ILCS 335/9.1, Grounds for disciplinary action ·
ilga.gov
815 ILCS 505/2, Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act ·
ilga.gov
815 ILCS 505/7, Civil penalties ·
ilga.gov
815 ILCS 513/18, Repairs following damaging weather ·
ilga.gov
815 ILCS 513/20, Consumer rights brochure ·
ilga.gov
IDFPR, Roofing Contractor ·
idfpr.illinois.gov
All accessed 4 August 2026.
Run the storm history instead of the storm.
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