What to do after a North Texas storm—without climbing onto the roof.

No. A wet, windy night is not an event. What justifies a look is hail you could hear on the roof or see on the ground, wind strong enough to move debris, anything visibly down in the garden, or a change you can see from the ground — grit in the gutters, a dented soft metal, a shingle out of line. An older roof lowers that bar, because it has less left to give.

No, and there is never a good reason you have to. Door-knocking after a storm is legitimate as a way of finding work and is also how the worst outcomes start, because the pressure is always to sign now. Take the paperwork, check the company exists and has done so for more than a season, read what you are actually authorising — some of these documents assign your claim — and get a second scope.

The date and rough time, which direction the wind was coming from, which rooms showed anything and when, what you moved and what you threw away, and who came to the door. Almost none of that can be reconstructed a fortnight later and all of it narrows a search. It is the cheapest thing available on the day and the thing most consistently skipped.

Take a dated set of photographs anyway, from the ground: each elevation, the gutters and downspouts, the vent caps, and the fins on the air-conditioning condenser. A record of a roof that came through an event intact is what lets you tell new damage from old the next time, and the next time is when it will matter. It takes a few minutes, and it is the only version of this evidence that can never be captured later.