Storm damage
Storm and Wind Damage Repair
Photograph it. Then tarp it. Then call your insurer. Doing those three in the wrong order is what costs people the claim.
Photograph it. Then tarp it. Then claim.
That order is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is the one people get wrong — understandably, because water is coming in and the instinct is to stop it. But a roof made watertight before anyone documented it is a roof whose damage now has to be argued from memory, to an adjuster who was not standing in your driveway.
Photographs from the ground. Several angles. The debris on the lawn counts too. Then cover it.
And please do not go up there
More people get hurt inspecting storm damage than get hurt by the storm. The surface is wet, there is loose material on it, and whatever you can see from a ladder we can see better from a drone or from the eave.
What wind actually does
It almost never lifts a roof out of the middle. It finds an edge — a rake, an eave, a ridge, somewhere the starter course ran short or a nail went in high — and peels from there.
Which is why the damage sits around the perimeter, and why a roof that visibly lost six shingles has usually lost the sealant bond on a good many more. Those ones are still lying flat and no longer stuck down. They will go in the next storm. Whether they make it into your claim depends entirely on whether anybody thought to check.
The nailing pattern is where claims get argued
A shingle rated for high wind only earns that rating if it was fastened the way the manufacturer said — right number of nails, in the nailing strip, driven flush. Four instead of six, or a row of nails placed above the strip, is invisible from the ground and is the most common reason an adjuster moves the cause from the weather to the installation.
We live in the busiest corner of the country for this
Western University runs the Northern Tornadoes Project, and its confirmed-event maps land on southwestern Ontario more than anywhere comparable. Most storms produce no tornado at all — just straight-line wind, which is perfectly capable of stripping a roof on its own.
Assessments here get written for an adjuster rather than for a sales meeting: what failed, where, on which elevation, consistent with wind from which direction, and what it takes to make good. You get it either way, whether or not we do the work.
Talk to a Woodstock roofing contractor
Three things get us most of the way there: which town you are in, roughly when the roof was last done, and what you are actually seeing — a stain on a ceiling, granules in the eavestrough, shingles on the lawn on Sunday morning. That is usually enough to tell you whether this is a repair, a claim, or a roof that has quietly reached the end, without anybody driving anywhere.