When spring and summer arrive in the Midwest, businesses and homeowners often have to schedule repairs for roof damage from the wind. Roof wind damage refers to any structural harm caused by storms or windy spring days. Here’s how you can figure out if your roof has sustained wind damage, as well as what causes it and how to address it.
Leading Causes of Roof Wind Damage
If you know the leading causes of roof wind damage, it’ll be easier for you to find potential problems and figure out how to fix them before they get worse.
Flying Debris
Strong winds can turn harmless objects into dangerous projectiles. Rocks, tree branches, and other debris can penetrate or damage your roof with enough force. While storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes cause more destructive flying debris, strong winds of speeds up to thirty miles an hour can also cause extensive damage.
Inclement Weather
Rain and hail storms often come with high winds. Strong winds can strip shingles, and hail pounds the roof’s exterior, both revealing the roof’s underlayment. Rain can then flow into these holes and cracks, which leads to water damage as well.
Pressure
When wind flows against a house, it’s dispersed around and over the structure as uplift pressure. As the wind blows over a roof’s surface, there’s a negative pressure that creates suction strong enough to lift shingles up, sometimes only part of the way, but sometimes fully. This pressure can remove and displace external parts of your roof.
Wind Gusts
The sheer force of powerful winds can damage buildings or homes. Strong gusts of wind strip flashing, peel off shingles, and loosen gutters and downspouts, causing many kinds of roof wind damage.
Unsecured Structures
The sheer force of powerful winds can damage buildings or homes. Strong gusts of wind strip flashing, peel off shingles, and loosen gutters and downspouts, causing many kinds of roof wind damage.
Signs of Wind Damage to Your Roof
The first step in protecting your roof from wind damage is to find any current problems. Take immediate action if you spot any of these signs of damage:
- Loose or missing shingles
- Stripped flashing
- Punctures of penetrations
- Bent or curled shingles
- Roof leaks or water damage
- Malfunctioning drainage systems
Roof Wind Damage on Different Structures
Wind affects any building, but the types and signs of damage can vary.
Flat Roof Damage
Even though flat roofs aren’t sloped like residential homes, wind speeds and uplift pressure can still damage them. Wind damage often appears on flat roof membranes in the form of frayed and damaged membrane edges. When strong winds hit a flat roof, its uplift pressure becomes greater than its speed and bears down on the roof membrane’s edges. This pressure lifts the edges, separating them from the rest of the membrane. If a roofing contractor installs the membrane improperly, the edges can get severely affected, and the membrane could eventually fly off the building.
Wind lifts the edges of roof membranes on TPO and EPDM roofs, while hail and debris cause cracks throughout these singly-ply membranes.
Residential Roof Damage
Unlike flat roofs, residential roofs have more surface area and raised structure for the wind to crash against during periods of high winds. Hips, ridges, and sloped roofs catch the wind’s assault with every pass. Asphalt shingles withstand sixty-mile-per-hour winds and higher (depending on the rating), but no roof is immune to years of weathering.
How To Address Roof Wind Damage
Now that you know how to spot wind damage, what comes next?
- Document the damage with pictures and prepare to file your insurance claim. Most homeowner’s insurance policies should cover weather-related damage.
- Contact a roofing contractor to perform a roof inspection after filing a claim. Your insurance company will send someone to inspect your roof, but you can also hire an independent roofing contractor for a third-party evaluation. Your contractor assesses the roof wind damage and documents it for the insurance company.
- After the inspection and repair estimate has been sent to your insurance company, they should send you a check in a few weeks or put the amount into your bank account. From there, it’s as simple as hiring a roofing company or contractor to tend to your roof.
Hire Kirberg Roofing for Wind Damage Repairs
Our team at Kirberg Company is the complete package for roof wind damage. We start all of our roof repairs by performing a roof inspection. We assess the roof for wind, hail, and water damage, documenting all damage we find. We fill out all necessary paperwork to help you file an insurance claim easily. Once your insurance company approves the claim, we will start making the repairs to your roof.
If you have a BUR system, we repair your system’s layers and replace lost gravel. If wind and storm damage compromises your TPO or EPDM roof, we restore your roofing system with a protective spray-on coating. We also perform roof replacements for roofs at the end of their lifespans or roofs too damaged for repairs or restoration.
Kirberg Roofing uses best safety practices and a team of roofing professionals to complete any job correctly. Our comprehensive commercial roofing services repair, restore, or replace your roofing system efficiently and safely. Let Kirberg Roofing be your all-in-one roofing contractor.
