What to do in the first hour after storm damage

Document before you touch anything

The instinct after a windstorm is to get a tarp up immediately. Take two minutes first and photograph everything from the ground: the missing area, the debris where it landed, the interior staining, and any wet insulation. Those photographs are what your insurer will use to decide the scope, and they cannot be recreated after the repair.

Then contain the water. Move what you can, put containers under active drips, and pull back carpet at the edges so the pad can dry. Do not climb onto a wet roof in wind; nothing up there is worth the fall, and a mechanically fastened tarp installed by a crew will hold better than anything weighted down with bricks.

Then call, in this order

A roofer who does emergency dry-in, then your insurer. Doing it in that order means the person on the phone with your adjuster has already seen the damage and can describe it in the language a claim needs. We keep a crew on call through the winter for exactly this.