(214) 807-0414Request an assessmentSeal strips
The wind damage everybody recognises is a missing shingle. The wind damage that costs money later is the tab that lifted, folded back and dropped flat again when the gust passed. From the street the roof is intact. Underneath, the seal is broken and the mat is creased, and the next storm starts from there.
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What this covers
Nails fix the shingle to the deck. A strip of heat-activated adhesive under the course above holds the leading edge down against uplift. They fail independently, and wind almost always breaks the second one first — which is why a roof can be losing its wind resistance without losing a single shingle.
A gust folds a tab back over itself and gravity returns it when the gust stops. The seal is now broken and the fiberglass mat carries a crease across the fold line. Neither is visible from the ground, from a driveway photograph, or from a drone directly overhead.
A hand under the tab and gentle upward pressure, worked in a pattern along the rakes, the ridge, the hips and the field. A tab that releases with no resistance is unsealed. This is the reason wind assessment is close-range work and the reason an aerial pass does not settle it.
What to know
The fold fractures the mat and the fracture stays there. It may not leak this season or next. It is a shingle that has become the starting point for the next event, and treating it as sound because it is not currently leaking is how a small repair becomes a large one two storms later.
Hand-sealing an unsealed but uncreased tab with a compatible asphalt cement is a legitimate repair for that tab. A creased one is replaced. Which was done where has to be in the record, because once the work is finished the two are indistinguishable from the ground and only one of them restored the shingle.
Rakes, ridges, hips, the first courses at the eave, and any plane that faced the storm. But a roof laid in cool weather, over a dusty deck, or with the seal strips misaligned can be unsealed from the day it went on. That is a workmanship finding, not a weather one, and calling it storm damage because a storm has recently happened would be wrong.
Choose a starting point
A short, non-diagnostic guide for working out what kind of assessment conversation to prepare for.
Decision support
Four situations, and the sensible next move for each. It does not diagnose a roof, decide insurance coverage, or stand in for somebody looking at the property.
Questions
Not necessarily, and the three that left are the least interesting part. What matters is how many tabs around them are unsealed or creased, which is a hands-on check across the affected planes rather than a repair of the visible gap.
An unsealed tab with an intact mat, yes — hand-sealed with a compatible cement. A tab with a crease across it, no. The judgment is made tab by tab with the shingle lifted, and the distinction should appear in what you are given afterwards.
Because the seal is what resists the next wind, not the one that has already happened. A roof with a run of broken seals along a rake is intact today and materially less able to stay that way. That is a condition worth documenting whether or not anything is done about it now.
Every plane that faced the storm, and the edges of the others. Wind concentrates at rakes, ridges, hips and the first courses at the eave, so that is where the pattern lives, and a check confined to the area around a visible gap will find only what was already visible. It is slow work, which is why it is the part most often skipped — and it is the part that decides what the roof does next.
Assessment request
Short, routing-only questions. Nothing here asks you to diagnose the roof yourself.