Storm Damage Roof Repair in St. Louis

If the decking turns out to be rotten once it is exposed, work pauses so you can see it before we replace anything. No surprise line items appearing on the final invoice.

Wind does not usually tear a roof off. What it does is break the seal. Every asphalt shingle has an adhesive strip bonding it to the course below, and once that bond breaks the shingle is effectively a flap. It lies back down and looks completely normal from the driveway. The next wind lifts it again, and rain goes underneath.

The physical tell is a crease, a horizontal fold line across a shingle where it bent back on itself. A creased shingle has a fractured mat and will not reseal. It is compromised whether or not it is out of place. We lift and check by hand along the rakes, the eaves and the ridge, because that is where uplift is strongest.

Missing shingles are the easy version. The harder and far more common version is a field full of unsealed ones, which is how a roof passes a glance while it is actively failing. We check seal by lifting tabs across each slope and seeing what releases under light pressure.

Ridge caps go first on most roofs, being the most exposed and the most likely to be under-fastened. Then rake edges, then anything downwind of an obstruction that accelerates air over it.

The rest of the property tells the story. Fence sections down, tree limbs, siding or soffit panels pulled loose, a gutter run sagging, damaged screens, debris strike marks on the roof surface. We photograph all of it, because a claim is stronger when the roof damage sits inside a picture of a storm that plainly happened.

For the insurance file we document every slope with photographs, mark test squares, measure creasing and seal-strip failure, and write the scope against the actual damage rather than against a template. We tie it to the dated event and meet the adjuster on the roof to walk it together, because disagreements resolve faster standing on the shingles than they do over email.

If water is coming in now, that comes first and the paperwork waits. We tarp properly, fastened to structure rather than weighted down with bricks, so the temporary fix survives the next system coming through.