Storm damage: what it looks like, what it sounds like, and what does not count

What actually counts as storm damage

Stand in your driveway after a bad night and look up. Unless a limb came down or a strip of shingles is lying on the lawn, the roof looks the same as it did on Tuesday. That is the normal outcome, and it is also the reason storm damage is the most misunderstood thing a homeowner ever has to make a decision about. The damage that matters is measured in millimetres of asphalt and in a bond that either still holds or does not.

A storm has four ways to hurt a roof, and only one of them is dramatic. Wind lifts and flexes the covering and breaks the seal that holds it down. Hail hits the covering hard enough to knock the armour off and bruise what is underneath. Water gets driven sideways into places gravity would never have taken it. And something solid — a limb, a piece of somebody else’s roof, a trampoline — lands on it. Everything on this page is a consequence of one of those four.

It is worth being precise about the word damage, because the whole conversation with a contractor and the whole conversation with an insurer turn on it. Damage is a change the storm caused. Deterioration is a change time caused. A twenty-two-year-old roof with curling tabs and bald patches is not undamaged — it is finished — but it was finished before the storm arrived, and no amount of wanting it to be otherwise makes the storm responsible for it. The reverse is also true and far more common: a four-year-old roof can look immaculate from the ground and have half its seals broken.

The five places a storm actually breaks a roof

These are components, not areas. Each does a specific job, each fails in a specific way, and each has its own tell.

Damage against ageing, side by side

Can wind damage a roof? Yes — usually without removing a single shingle

This is the most-asked roofing question there is, and the honest answer is more unsettling than a yes. Wind damages roofs constantly, at speeds well below anything that would make the news, and the usual result is a roof that looks completely normal from every angle you can see it from.

Wind does not push a roof down. It pulls it up. Air moving across a sloped surface accelerates over the ridge and around the corners, and where air accelerates its pressure drops — so the roof plane has lower pressure above it than the air trapped in the attic and under the shingle edges below it. The result is uplift, and uplift is not evenly distributed. It is highest at the corners, along the rake and eave edges, and at the ridge, which is precisely the order in which roofs come apart.

The seal, and why breaking it is the whole story

Every asphalt shingle carries a strip of adhesive that softens in the sun and bonds the shingle to the course below. Once that has happened the field behaves as a single membrane and the wind has nothing to get hold of. When a gust gets under an edge and peels that bond, three things happen at once: the shingle becomes a flap, the nails start working in their holes, and the course beneath is exposed to wind-driven water. Then the shingle usually falls back into place and looks exactly as it did before.

That is the reason a homeowner and a roofer can stand in the same driveway and disagree completely. A broken seal is found by hand — a technician lifts the tab and feels whether it bonds — or by a horizontal crease line across the shingle where it folded back on itself and reseated. Neither is visible from the ground, and neither shows up in a photograph taken from the kerb.

What wind damage looks like, in the order it appears

What a wind rating does and does not promise

Shingles carry a tested wind class — ASTM D3161 gives Classes A, D and F, and ASTM D7158 gives Classes D, G and H, with Class F corresponding to 110 mph and Class H to 150 mph. Those numbers describe a tested assembly: that shingle, that many fasteners, in the manufacturer’s nailing zone, with the specified starter at the perimeter. Install the same shingle with fewer nails, or nail it high above the zone, or use cut-up shingles as starter, and the class on the wrapper no longer describes anything that is on your house. It is also not a guarantee. A rating is a laboratory result under a defined test, not a promise about a particular Tuesday in Maryland.

What hail does, and why a bruise matters more than a dent

Hail is the opposite problem to wind. Wind damage is invisible and consequential; hail damage is often visible and inconsequential, and telling the two apart is the entire skill.

A hailstone hitting a shingle does two things. It knocks granules loose, exposing the asphalt underneath to ultraviolet light that will now dry and embrittle it. And, if it hits hard enough, it fractures or bruises the mat under the asphalt — a soft, slightly depressed spot that you can feel with a thumb more easily than you can see. There is no hole. Water does not come through it tomorrow. What has happened is that the shingle’s remaining service life has been shortened at that spot, and in a few seasons of Maryland freeze-thaw the bruise becomes a crack and the crack becomes a path to the deck.

Functional damage and cosmetic damage are different things

This is the distinction every adjuster works to and most homeowners have never heard. Functional damage is damage that shortens the life of the roof or compromises its ability to keep water out: a fractured mat, a bruise, granule loss down to asphalt, a split, a displaced shingle. Cosmetic damage is damage you can see that does not do either: a mark on a metal vent hood, a dinged gutter, a scuff. Both are real. Only one of them is an argument for a new roof, and some policies now carry an explicit cosmetic-damage exclusion. Read your own declarations page rather than assume in either direction.

The soft-metal test, which you can do yourself

Shingles are debatable. Aluminium is not. Walk around the house and look at the gutters, the downspouts, the roof vent hoods, the ridge vent covers, the fins on the outdoor air-conditioning condenser, the garage door, the mailbox, the letterbox post, any painted metal fence. Fresh hail dents in soft metal are bright, sharp-edged and directional — they will nearly all face the same way, because the storm came from one direction. If the metal on your property is dented, hail hard enough to mark your roof landed on it. If nothing anywhere is dented, be sceptical of anyone telling you the roof is destroyed.

The questions people actually ask about hail

• Does hail always damage a roof? No. Small, soft or wind-sheltered hail can fall for twenty minutes and leave a sound roof completely sound. The damage depends on the size and density of the stones, the angle and speed they arrive at, the slope and orientation of each roof plane, and — enormously — the age and brittleness of the shingle they land on.
• Why does the same storm damage one house and not the next? Because hail falls in narrow, ragged swathes and arrives at an angle. One side of a street can be hit and the other side missed, and on a single house the west slope can be marked while the east slope is untouched. This is normal, and it is also why a whole street being re-roofed at once is not by itself evidence that your roof needs it.
• Can hail damage the decking underneath? Very rarely. Hail damages the covering; the deck is protected by everything above it. Where decking gets involved it is almost always the second act — a bruise that cracked, a winter of water through it, and rot in the sheathing a season or two later. See decking and sheathing.
• Why is hail damage bad if there is no leak? Because you are not being sold a leak, you are being sold time. A bruised, de-granulated shingle has had years taken off it, and the bill arrives late — usually after the window for reporting the storm that caused it has closed.
• Does an impact-rated shingle stop it? It helps and it does not immunise. Class 4 under UL 2218 means a two-inch steel ball dropped twice on the same spot leaves no crack in the mat. That is a real, tested, documented difference in how the mat behaves, and it is not a storm. Large hail damages Class 4 roofs too.

What storm damage looks like from the ground

You can do a genuinely useful assessment of your own roof in about twenty minutes without leaving the ground, and it is worth doing before anybody knocks on your door, because it means the conversation starts with what you have already seen rather than what you are being told.

What to do in the first 48 hours after a storm

Order matters more than speed here. This is the sequence that keeps every option open, including the option of doing nothing.

1. Deal with water first, and nothing else. If water is coming in, move what is under it, put a container down, and if a ceiling is bulging with trapped water, pierce it at the lowest point with something long while standing to one side. A controlled hole in one place is a repair. A ceiling that lets go on its own is a room.
2. Stay away from anything wet and electrical. Water tracking down a wall reaches wiring and light fittings before it reaches your ceiling. If a fitting is dripping or a stain is spreading around a ceiling rose, switch that circuit off and leave it off.
3. Photograph everything before it is touched. Inside and outside, wide and close, with the date. This is the single highest-value ten minutes of the whole process and it costs nothing.
4. Get it covered if it is open. An open roof is a deadline, not a decision. Emergency tarping stops the loss growing, and it is ordinary practice to protect a property from further damage while a claim is being decided — keep the receipt and the photographs. We tarp across Maryland; see emergency roof tarping.
5. Get it inspected and documented. A dated, photographed inspection of the whole roof, slope by slope, tells you whether you have real damage before you have to decide anything. Ours is free and you keep the report either way.
6. Then decide about a claim, with the evidence in front of you. Read your own policy for the notice requirement — most policies require prompt notice of a loss, and the wording is yours to check. Whether to file is your decision and whether to pay is your carrier’s.
7. Do not sign anything to a stranger in your driveway. Not an inspection authorisation, not a contingency agreement, not a document that assigns your claim benefits to a contractor. A Maryland home improvement contract signed in your home carries a three-business-day right to cancel in writing, and no legitimate company needs your signature the same afternoon.

How serious is a roof leak, and how to tell whether you have one

Every roof leak is serious in one specific sense: the moment water is inside the building envelope, the damage stops being about the roof. It is about the deck, the insulation, the framing, the drywall, the wiring and — within a couple of weeks in a Maryland summer — mould. The rate at which it gets worse is not steady. It is slow, slow, slow, and then a ceiling comes down.

What varies enormously is the urgency. A stain the size of a coin on a garage ceiling and a wet patch spreading around a bathroom light are the same phenomenon at very different points on the same curve, and you should treat them differently.

How to tell whether you have a roof leak at all

Most leaks announce themselves late and quietly, and half of what gets reported as a roof leak turns out to be something else. The signs, in roughly the order they appear:

• A stain with a defined edge, usually brown or yellow. A tide mark is water that arrived, sat, and dried. Concentric rings inside it mean it has happened more than once, which tells you this is not new.
• Paint or plaster that has gone slightly soft, bubbled or blistered in one patch of ceiling, most often where a ceiling meets a wall.
• Damp, matted or discoloured insulation in the attic, and dark staining or streaking on the underside of the sheathing. This is where a leak is visible long before it reaches a room.
• Rusty nail shanks poking through the deck in the attic, or a rusty ring around them. Metal rusts where it gets repeatedly wet.
• A musty smell in a cupboard, a loft or an upstairs room that gets stronger after rain, with nothing visible to explain it.
• A patch of ceiling or wall that is measurably colder, or peeling wallpaper at a seam. Wet materials conduct heat differently.
• Sound. Which deserves its own paragraph, because it is often the first thing anybody notices.

What a roof leak sounds like

A leak in an open space — a garage, an unfinished basement, a loft with no insulation — is an unmistakable slow, regular tick as drops land on a hard surface, spaced seconds apart, continuing for a while after the rain has stopped. That is the easy one.

The one people miss is the leak into an insulated ceiling, and its characteristic sound is a soft, muffled thud or a faint tap that you notice mainly because it is out of rhythm with the rain outside. Water landing on fibreglass or blown insulation makes almost no noise at all, which is exactly why those leaks are usually found by smell or by a stain months later. A leak running inside a wall cavity sounds like a faint trickle or a gurgle behind the plaster, sometimes only for a minute or two after heavy rain. And a leak that has already soaked into drywall makes no sound whatsoever — by then the material is doing the work of a sponge.

Why a roof leaks sometimes and not other times

It is one of the most common questions we get and it makes people doubt themselves. There are four ordinary explanations, and none of them means the leak is imaginary.

1. Direction. A flashing detail that sheds a vertical downpour perfectly will let water in when the same amount of rain arrives sideways on a north-west wind. A leak that only happens in certain storms is usually a wind-driven-rain leak at a wall, a chimney or a window head.
2. Volume. Some paths only fill above a certain rate. A blocked valley or a gutter that overflows behind the fascia does nothing in drizzle and pours in a downpour.
3. Ice. A winter-only leak at the eaves is usually an ice dam: meltwater from a warm roof refreezes at the cold overhang and backs standing water up under the shingles, which is what ice-and-water membrane at the eaves exists to defeat. That is a ventilation and insulation problem as much as a roofing one.
4. It is not the roof. Condensation in a poorly ventilated attic drips like a leak, appears in cold weather with no rain at all, and is fixed by balancing intake and exhaust rather than by roofing. So can a blocked gutter, a failed window seal, a cracked chimney crown or siding. A good inspection rules those out rather than quoting for a roof.

How long before a leak shows up

There is no useful average, and anyone offering one is guessing. What governs it is how much material sits between the entry point and something you can see. Water arriving directly above a plaster ceiling with no insulation can stain it during the same storm. Water landing on deep loft insulation can be absorbed for weeks before anything appears below, and a slow leak into a wall cavity can run for a season with no visible sign at all until paint lifts or a smell develops. This is the reason a roof can be leaking for a year before anybody finds out, and the reason an attic inspection after a storm is worth far more than waiting to see whether a ceiling changes colour.

How much wind or hail damage means replacing the roof

There is no threshold in nature. Nobody can tell you that a certain number of damaged shingles means a new roof, because the answer depends on four things about your particular roof, and none of them is a count.

What a repair actually costs, published in advance

Storm repairs are made of a small number of repeatable items, and we publish the rates for them rather than inventing a number at the kitchen table. From our own change-order rate card: a plumbing vent boot is $65, re-flashing a chimney with new step and counter flashing is $600, re-flashing a skylight is $450, and a replaced sheet of 4x8 roof decking is $120. A full replacement is priced per roofing square, and our price book sets a hard floor of $600 per square for an architectural shingle system — a number under that floor is not a cheaper roof, it is a roof somebody else finishes. Reading the whole quote is a subject of its own: see how to read a roofing estimate.

Can a hail damaged roof be repaired?

Often, yes — and it depends on what the hail actually did. Scattered functional damage on one slope of a young, matchable roof is a repair, and a competent contractor should be willing to say so and quote it. Widespread bruising across every plane of a roof already well into its second decade is not a repair, because you would be spending real money to extend something that was nearly finished before the storm and will not seal reliably where it is worked on. The dishonest versions of this answer run in both directions: the contractor who says every hailed roof must be replaced, and the one who patches a comprehensively bruised roof and books the profit knowing the call-back lands on somebody else.

Does homeowners insurance cover storm damage to a roof?

Usually, when the damage is genuinely storm damage — and the sentence has to be that careful, because coverage is your carrier’s determination and never a contractor’s. Anyone who tells you before an inspection that your claim will be approved is telling you something they cannot know.

A standard homeowner policy covers sudden accidental direct physical loss and excludes wear, deterioration, and damage that could have been prevented by maintenance. Wind and hail are named perils on most policies in this market. That single distinction — sudden event against gradual decline — is what the entire claim turns on, and it is why the first three sections of this page matter so much: they are the difference between a covered loss and a maintenance item.

The parts of a policy that decide the number

• Replacement cost against actual cash value. An RCV policy pays what it costs to replace the roof, usually in two instalments with the depreciation released once the work is done. An ACV policy pays the depreciated value of a roof of that age, and the gap is yours. Some policies apply ACV to the roof specifically even when the rest of the house is RCV. It is the single largest variable in what you receive, and it is in your declarations page. The mechanics are set out in full on the roof insurance claim, start to finish.
• Your deductible. On an approved claim your deductible is typically your out-of-pocket cost, as your policy and your carrier determine. Some policies carry a separate, larger wind or hail deductible, sometimes expressed as a percentage of the dwelling coverage rather than a flat figure. Check which yours has before you assume the number.
• Cosmetic-damage exclusions. Some policies exclude damage that marks the roof without shortening its life. This is why the functional and cosmetic distinction earlier on this page is not an academic one.
• The notice requirement. Most policies require prompt notice of a loss and set an outside limit for reporting. Read your own wording. The longer the gap between the storm and the inspection, the harder it becomes to show that this damage came from that storm rather than from any of the ones before it.
• Whether other property was affected. Damaged siding, gutters, screens, fencing and outbuildings usually fall under the same claim, and gutters in particular are commonly bundled with a storm-damaged roof. They also corroborate the roof damage, which is why they belong in the photographs even if you were not thinking about them.

What we do, and the line we do not cross

United Developers is a licensed Maryland home improvement contractor, MHIC #111971. We are not public adjusters and we do not act as them. We inspect the roof, we document what we find with dated photographs slope by slope, we produce a written line-item scope of the repair or replacement, and we meet your adjuster on the roof so that the two of us are looking at the same evidence at the same time. What we do not do is negotiate or adjust your claim, represent you to your carrier, or promise you an outcome. In Maryland, adjusting a claim on a homeowner’s behalf for a fee requires a public adjuster licence — a different licence from ours, held by different people, for a different job.

And the one that has to be said plainly, because in a storm market somebody will offer it: we will never pay, waive, rebate, absorb or discount your insurance deductible. It is prohibited by Md. Code Ann., Insurance § 27-407.2, it is fraud, it exposes you as well as us, and a contractor who offers it in your driveway has told you exactly how they intend to treat the rest of your claim. On an approved claim, your deductible is your contribution, and every honest quote in the market is built on that assumption.

Six things that look like storm damage and are not

Half of the storm inspections we do end with us telling somebody their roof is fine. These are the six things that most often bring us out, and the honest answer to each one.

• Dark streaks running down the slopes. Algae, Gloeocapsa magma, growing on surface moisture. Cosmetic, worse on shaded and north-facing planes, not a structural condition and not a reason to replace a roof. Do not pressure-wash asphalt to remove it: that strips granules and can affect warranty coverage.
• Granules in the gutter on a young roof. New shingles shed loose granules for a while after installation. What matters is quantity, timing and whether there are bare spots on the shingles to match.
• Blisters. Small raised bubbles in the shingle surface, sometimes with the granules popped off the top. They come from moisture or gas in the asphalt at manufacture and from heat, and they are a manufacturing or ventilation issue rather than an impact one. Hail marks are depressions. Blisters are bumps.
• Nail pops. A fastener backing out and tenting the shingle above it. It is a fastening and deck-movement problem, it is real and it should be fixed, and it is not what a storm did.
• Damp in the attic in cold weather with no rain. Warm moist household air condensing on cold sheathing. It drips like a leak and it is a ventilation problem, not a roofing one.
• A curled, bald, brittle roof after a storm. The storm did not do that; twenty-odd years did. It may well need replacing — see why replace a 20-year-old roof — but calling it storm damage is how a claim gets denied and how a homeowner ends up feeling misled by everybody involved.

What we document after a storm, and what we refuse to do

What the post-storm door knock sounds like

After a real storm, crews arrive from outside the area and work the neighbourhood door to door. Some of them are perfectly legitimate businesses. The sentences below are how you tell, and none of them requires you to know anything about roofing.

Storm damage questions Maryland homeowners ask

Where to go next

Storm damage is a diagnosis. These are the pages that cover what happens next — the claim, the components a storm attacks first, and what a replacement should cost when it comes to it.