After a bad storm the question worth answering is whether anything happened to your roof at all, and memory is a poor way to settle it. Benton County has a confirmed public record of severe weather, and four years of it says far more about what a roof here lives through than any single afternoon does. Here is what that record holds — and what it can and cannot tell you about your own roof.
The four-year picture
Across 2023 through 2026, the NOAA and NCEI storm events record for Benton County holds 18 separate hail days and 100 individual hail reports. Of those reports, 52 involved stones an inch or larger. The largest logged in that window measured four inches, and the peak recorded wind gust reached 96 mph.
Those numbers nest inside each other rather than competing. Eighteen days produced a hundred reports, because a single storm system generates multiple confirmed observations as it crosses a county, and fifty-two of those observations crossed the one-inch threshold that starts to matter for a shingle.
What a one-inch stone does
Size is the reason the one-inch count is worth separating out. Small hail bounces off a sound asphalt roof without leaving much behind. Once stones reach roughly an inch, they carry enough energy to bruise the mat underneath the surface granules, and a bruise is damage that doesn't announce itself from the yard. Bruising like that is what hail damage looks like on a Bella Vista roof far more often than a hole is.
Here's the failure mode worth understanding: the surface can look intact while the material below it has lost structure. A roof that took a serious hit in one of those 52 reports can photograph perfectly from the driveway.
Specific days on the county log
The record names dates as well as totals. Softball-sized hail was reported around Sulphur Springs on March 14, 2024. Tennis-ball-sized hail was logged near Bentonville on May 26, 2024, and hen-egg-sized hail near Garfield on April 15, 2023. Winds of 90 mph were recorded around Pea Ridge on April 1, 2024.
The most recent entry inside Bella Vista itself came on March 4, 2026, when hail up to golf-ball size was recorded at two points in town on the same day. A dated entry like that one matters later, when a roof insurance claim turns on what was documented and when.
What a county number cannot tell you
A county total describes a county. It doesn't describe your roof, and the honest limit of this data is that two houses on the same street can come out of one storm in completely different condition depending on slope, orientation and what the trees overhead were doing. Which of those a particular roof is in comes down to a roof inspection, not to the county figure.
The value of the record is that it establishes a pattern rather than an exception. Hail is a recurring feature of the weather here, not a once-a-decade event, and that changes what a reasonable maintenance rhythm looks like. Whether any of it landed on your particular roof is a separate question, and only a walk answers that. It's the one thing a county figure can't do for you.
Storm on your street recently? Send Bella Vista Elite Roofing the address and what you saw, and ask to have what's up there documented before anything is priced.
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