Storm damage and insurance claims

The clock started with the storm

Insurance treats the storm itself as the date of loss. Every deadline in your policy is measured from that day, not from the afternoon months later when you spotted a stain on the ceiling. Storm damage is easy to miss from the ground, which is exactly how people lose the time they thought they had.

Central Ohio had a real one on 11 August 2026: an 82mph gust recorded at John Glenn, more than 130,000 AEP customers without power. If that front came over your house, your date of loss is already set, whether or not you have been on the roof since.

What the adjuster is looking for

An adjuster is not guessing. They are looking for hail bruises, the soft dents that break the shingle mat without tearing it. For wind creases, where a tab has been folded back and no longer seals. And for collateral: dents in gutters, vents and other soft metal that prove the storm hit your house and not just your street. It is a checklist, and a roof either shows the evidence or it does not.

This is why we meet the adjuster on the roof, not in the driveway. Our photographs are taken slope by slope before they arrive, so the meeting is two people looking at the same damage rather than one person describing it. When the scope is being written we are there to point at what we found, and if something is missed we say so on the spot, while it is still a conversation.

How the claim runs

1. We inspect and document first Every slope photographed and dated, the penetrations checked one by one, collateral damage recorded. If there is no claim worth making, we tell you that too, and you have lost nothing.
2. You call your insurer The claim is yours to open, not ours. You report the date of the storm as the date of loss. Anything urgent gets tarped right away: stopping further damage is your responsibility under the policy, and reasonable emergency work is generally covered.
3. We meet the adjuster on the roof You tell us the appointment, we show up with the photographs. The adjuster walks the roof with our documentation in hand instead of starting from nothing.
4. The scope gets agreed The insurer writes what they will pay for. If the scope misses damage we documented, we submit the evidence for the difference. This is normal, not a fight, and it is where the photographs earn their keep.
5. The work is done to the scope We build what the claim paid for, invoiced against the agreed scope, and you keep the full file: photographs, scope and invoice, start to finish.

Repair claim or full replacement

Not every storm claim is a new roof, and pretending otherwise is how roofers get a bad name. A handful of wind-lifted tabs on one slope is a repair claim, and it is settled as one. A replacement is on the table when the damage runs across slopes, when the mat is bruised widely enough that patching just moves the next leak, or when the shingle is discontinued and a repair cannot be matched to the rest of the roof. We tell you which one you have before anyone calls the insurer, in writing, with the photographs that support it.

What a claim will not cover is age. Granules worn away over twenty years, a boot that perished in the sun, a roof that was already leaking before the front came through: that is maintenance, not a storm, and an adjuster can tell the difference. So can we, and we will say so rather than send you into a claim that will be denied. If your roof is simply old, the honest conversation is what a replacement costs in Columbus.