What to Do After Storm Damage to Your Roof
The first few days, exactly what to photograph, your duty to stop further damage, and how a roof claim actually moves — written for homeowners in Eastern North Carolina.
If a storm has just come through Rocky Mount, Greenville, Wilson, Tarboro, or anywhere else in Eastern North Carolina and you think your roof took a hit, the most useful thing you can do this week is build a record. Not a decision, not a contract — a record.
Waiting costs you twice. It costs you physically, because water that gets past the decking moves into insulation and framing, and one ceiling stain turns into a drywall and mold problem. And it costs you on paper, because the longer you wait, the harder it becomes for anyone — you, a roofer, or an adjuster — to separate what the storm did from what the following two months of weather did.
So the order below is the order that actually helps: look, photograph, protect the house, then start the paperwork.
The First Few Days
Right away — walk the ground, not the roof
From the yard and the driveway, look for shingles or shingle pieces on the ground, dented gutters and downspouts, bent vent caps, piles of granules where the downspouts drain, and marks on anything soft — window screens, siding, the grill lid, the mailbox. Then walk every room and look at the ceilings. If you can get into the attic safely, take a flashlight and look for daylight, wet decking, or damp insulation. Do not climb onto a roof that is wet or storm-damaged. A fall is a far bigger problem than a shingle.
Before you clean up or cover anything — photograph it
The photographs taken before a tarp goes on, before the yard is picked up, and before any temporary repair is made are the only ones that show what the storm itself did. Once a tarp is up, that view is gone permanently. The next section covers exactly what to shoot.
Same day, if water is coming in — stop it
Cover the opening, catch the water, and move furniture, rugs, and anything electrical out from under the drip. This is your responsibility, not something that waits for an adjuster to arrive. Keep every receipt for what you spend doing it.
Within a few days — report it to your carrier
Call the claim number on your policy or insurance card. You will be asked for your policy number, the date of the storm, and a description of what you found. You do not need to know how bad it is, what caused it, or what it costs to make that call — that is what the inspection is for. Policies commonly set expectations about reporting a loss promptly; what applies to you is written in your own policy, so read it or ask your carrier.
Have the roof inspected by a roofer
Separate from any claim, you want to know what is actually up there. Wind that breaks the seal between shingle courses leaves a roof that looks untouched from the driveway and comes apart in the next thunderstorm. That is worth finding out now rather than in August.
What to Photograph, and How
This is the part most homeowners get wrong, and it is the part that costs them most later. A photograph of a damaged shingle, on its own, tells a reader almost nothing. It does not say which house, which slope, which direction that slope faces, how big the mark is, or when the picture was taken. Someone opening that file weeks later, in an office, having never stood in your yard, cannot place it.
So the job is not take pictures of the damage. The job is to build a record a stranger can follow.
Start wide, then work in
Shoot every side of the house from the yard, standing far enough back that the whole elevation and some of the roof are in the frame. Do all four sides in the same order every time. These are boring photographs and they are the ones that make everything else usable, because they establish which house this is and which side you are looking at. Then take a medium shot of each slope, and only then the close-ups. Someone should be able to follow your photos from the street to the shingle without ever losing track of where they are.
Put something in the frame for scale
A close-up of a mark on a shingle is unreadable with nothing beside it. Lay a tape measure, a coin, a credit card, or a carpenter pencil next to the mark and shoot it again. If the area is safely reachable, outline the mark with chalk or a lumber crayon first — a circled mark reads clearly in a photograph, while an uncircled one disappears into the granules.
Get the date on it and keep the originals
Leave your camera timestamp settings alone, and do not crop, filter, or screenshot the photos — a screenshot throws away the file date and everything else stored with the image. Keep the originals on the phone and back the set up somewhere else the same week. Write down which slope each set came from and which direction that slope faces. Two lines in a notebook today saves a long conversation six weeks from now.
Photograph the soft metal — that is your corroborating evidence
Marks on shingles can be argued about. Dents in metal cannot be washed off, aged away, or blamed on foot traffic. Hail that hit the roof also hit everything else on the property, so photograph the gutters, gutter aprons, drip edge, and downspouts (sight along them at a low angle — dents show up in the reflection), the vent caps, turbine and ridge vents, the pipe boot collars, the fins on the outdoor air-conditioning unit, the window screens and wraps, the garage door, the siding and fascia, and the mailbox, deck boards, fence caps, and patio furniture. Wind leaves a different signature: shingles lifted or gone along rakes, eaves, and ridges, and debris pushed consistently from one direction. Photograph the direction as well as the damage — a shot showing which way everything was driven is worth more than one more close-up.
Go inside, and go into the attic
Photograph every ceiling and wall stain twice — a wide shot showing which room it is in, and a close-up — and write down the date you first noticed it. In the attic, shoot the underside of the decking for water marks, daylight, or wet insulation. Interior water is the thing homeowners under-document most, because early on it does not look like much.
Shoot a slow video walkaround
Narrate it out loud: the date, the address, which side of the house you are on, and what you are pointing at. Two minutes of video with your own voice on it ties the whole set of stills together, and it takes no skill at all.
Capture what is still lying there, before anyone tidies up
Shingle pieces in the yard, granules in the splash block, a gutter still hanging crooked, a limb still on the roof. As soon as a crew cleans up or a tarp goes on, that evidence is gone. Shoot it first, then clean up.
If you want the longer version of this — including how test squares are marked out so damage density gets counted rather than eyeballed, and how to organize a photo set so it stays readable months later — a roofing trade reference covers the same ground in more detail in its article on documenting roof damage for a claim. Our own checklist of what a documentation package should contain is on our documentation requirements page.
You Have a Duty to Prevent Further Damage
Homeowners policies generally include a condition requiring the policyholder to take reasonable steps to protect the property from further damage after a loss. This one catches people out: it is not optional, and it does not wait for an adjuster to arrive. The exact wording that applies to you is in your own policy — read it, or ask your carrier what yours says.
In practice that means stopping water. Tarp the opening or have someone tarp it. Board up a hole. Put a bucket under an active drip and move the furniture, the rug, and anything electrical out from under it. Pull up soaked carpet pad. Get air moving on wet drywall.
What it does not mean is making permanent repairs before the roof has been inspected. Emergency protection is temporary by design — a tarp, a board, a patch to hold water out until the real work is scheduled. Photograph the damage before you cover it, and photograph the temporary work afterwards, so the file shows both what was there and what you did about it.
Then keep every receipt: tarps, lumber, fasteners, tape, a box fan, a dehumidifier rental, a hotel night if the house is not livable, and any invoice for emergency work. Put them in one envelope, or one album on your phone. Give copies to your carrier and keep the originals. How those costs get treated is between you and your carrier — but you can only ask about a receipt you kept.
How a Roof Claim Moves
Once you report the loss, a claim follows a fairly consistent shape. Knowing the shape in advance is most of what makes it less stressful.
You report the loss
The carrier opens a claim and gives you a claim number. Write it down along with the name and direct number of whoever you spoke to. From that point on, keep a running log of every call — date, who, what was said. It costs nothing and it is the single most useful habit in the entire process.
A field adjuster is assigned and schedules an inspection
This is a person who comes to the property and looks at the roof. Ask when they will be there, and be home for it. You can have your roofer there at the same time, and most homeowners do — it means someone who works on roofs every day is on the property while the roof is being written up.
The inspection happens
The adjuster looks at the roof and the property, takes their own photographs and measurements, and often marks off test areas to count damage density rather than estimate it. Hand over your photo set and your notes — especially anything shot before the cleanup, because that is the one thing they cannot see for themselves.
A scope is written
Afterward the adjuster produces a scope of loss: an itemized document listing what they found and what work they wrote for. Read it line by line. It is a construction document, and ordinary errors in it are common — a slope not listed, a vent left off, missing drip edge, the wrong shingle type, a measurement that does not match the house.
When the scope misses something
This happens routinely and it is not a fight. The answer is documentation: the missed item, photographed, measured, and written down. Your roofer can prepare that and hand it to you. What you do with it, and what your carrier decides, is between you and them. The same applies to anything nobody could have seen on inspection day — decking condition, old flashing, extra layers underneath — which only becomes visible once the roof comes off and has to be recorded on the day it is found.
The work is scheduled and built
Permits, materials, a crew, a date on the calendar, and a final inspection at the end.
A step-by-step walkthrough of that sequence, including what a scope of loss contains and how additional documentation is handled once one has been written, is set out by a roofing trade reference in its article on the roof insurance claim process. Our own version, focused on what we do at each stage, is on our insurance claim process page, and what to expect on inspection day is covered in working with insurance adjusters.
Who Decides What
Your policy and your carrier decide what is covered and what is paid. A roofing contractor does not, and any roofer who tells you otherwise is telling you something they cannot back up. As your Contractor of Record, Carolina Trophy Roofs documents what is on your roof, prepares a detailed construction estimate, meets the adjuster at your property, answers technical questions about the roof, and builds the approved work. We do not interpret your policy and we do not act for you inside your claim. In North Carolina, representing a policyholder in a claim is licensed work that belongs to a licensed public adjuster — we can refer you to one, and we have written about when a storm claim needs more than a roofer.
What a Roofer Sees on a Roof
A field adjuster handles many kinds of loss across many trades — a roof one day, water damage the next, a fire the week after — and after a storm crosses a whole county they are working through a queue. A roofer looks at one material all day, every day, in one climate. Both people are standing on the same roof. The difference is time on that specific material, and it shows up in a handful of specific things worth knowing about, because you can ask about them yourself.
Fractured mats
A hail strike can fracture the fiberglass mat underneath the surface of a shingle without knocking much granule off the top. From six feet away it looks fine. Pressed with a thumb it gives, soft, like a bruise on fruit, because the reinforcement inside it is broken. That is a functional failure with a clock on it — the fracture opens up through heat cycling and eventually lets water through. It is found by hand as much as by eye, which is why a real inspection means somebody on the roof rather than a look from the driveway.
Blisters and scuffs that look like hail and are not
Manufacturing blisters pop and leave a round crater that photographs almost exactly like an impact mark. Foot traffic scrapes granules off in a line. Age sheds them evenly across a whole slope. Ruling those out matters just as much as spotting real damage, and getting it wrong in either direction wastes time and money.
Sealant strip failure
Every asphalt shingle is bonded to the course below it by a strip of adhesive. Wind can break that bond without moving the shingle at all. The roof looks perfect from the ground and photographs as untouched, but each unsealed shingle is now a loose flap waiting on the next storm. It is found by lifting shingles by hand across a slope, and it is one of the most commonly under-recorded forms of wind damage precisely because there is nothing to see.
Pattern by slope and exposure
Hail arrives at an angle, driven by the wind, so it hits some slopes hard and others barely at all. Wind concentrates at rakes, eaves, ridges, and the first courses facing the direction it came from. Damage that lines up in one direction across the roof, the soft metals, and the houses next door tells a coherent story. Damage scattered evenly over every slope usually tells a different one. Reading that pattern, and photographing it as a pattern rather than as a pile of individual marks, is a large part of the job — and it cuts both ways, because sometimes the honest answer is that the roof is not storm-damaged.
What only shows up at tear-off
Decking condition, rot around penetrations, old or badly installed flashing, unexpected extra layers, and nail patterns from previous work cannot be seen until the roof comes off. Whatever turns up at that stage gets photographed and recorded the day it is found, the same as everything else.
What We Do at Each Step
- • Inspect the roof at no charge, whether or not there is a claim, and tell you what we find.
- • Document it — photographs and video, measurements, drone aerial imagery where it helps, moisture detection and thermal imaging, and an evaluation against current code requirements.
- • Prepare a detailed construction estimate — a line-item breakdown of materials and labor, code upgrade requirements, construction sequencing, and manufacturer specifications.
- • Meet the adjuster at your property as your Contractor of Record, present what we documented, and answer technical questions about the roof.
- • Record what turns up at tear-off — decking, flashing, hidden layers — on the day it is found, and give you that documentation.
- • Build the approved work — permits and scheduling, the installation itself, progress updates, final inspection, and warranty registration.
- • Refer you to a licensed public adjuster if your claim reaches a point that calls for representation, which is not something a roofing contractor is licensed to provide.
Had a Storm Come Through?
We will come out, get on the roof, and document what is actually up there. Rocky Mount, Greenville, and across Eastern North Carolina.
We point you to that particular reference rather than somewhere else because Rusty Pugh and Joshua Jones of this company contributed to those two articles.