Derecho Roof Damage Across the Midwest

The word describes a line of storms that keeps going for hours and produces widespread straight-line wind along its whole track. On radar it often looks like a bow bending forward in the middle. On the ground the wind arrives first, sometimes before a drop of rain, and it keeps blowing hard for several minutes instead of the short burst a normal storm brings. Everything gets pushed the same direction. Trees go down in parallel rows, which is the signature that separates it from a tornado, where debris gets thrown in from different angles.

Wind doesn't hit a roof so much as pull on it. Air racing over the ridge and around the eaves creates suction, and that suction concentrates at edges, corners and rakes. The first thing to fail is the sealant strip holding each tab down. Once it lets go, the tab flaps, bending back over the nail line again and again until the shingle creases. A creased shingle has a fractured mat along that fold. It may settle back down and look normal from the street, but it won't reseal, and the next strong wind takes it off.

After a derecho we find more unsealed and creased shingles than missing ones. A tab that lifted and dropped back leaves clues: a straight crease line roughly where the nails sit, a clean band where the sealant tore, granules scuffed off the course above, sometimes a nail head pushed up through the mat. You can't see any of that from a ladder at the gutter. It takes walking every slope and gently lifting tabs on the windward side, then the leeward side, because wind wraps around a house in ways that aren't always obvious.

Derechos drop a lot of trees, and a large limb through the roof deck is a structural repair, not a shingle repair. If something big came through, stay out of the attic and the rooms under it until somebody has looked, and keep people away from sagging ceilings that are holding water. Get the opening covered fast. Our emergency tarping crews can dry-in the hole so the house stops taking water while the claim catches up. Photograph the tree on the roof before it's removed; the carrier will want to see it.

Age changes how a roof handles wind. A shingle that has spent fifteen or twenty summers in the sun loses flexibility, and its sealant strip has been baked and chilled through countless cycles. Those roofs lose tabs in winds a five-year-old roof would barely notice. Carriers know this and sometimes argue the damage is wear. The answer is evidence: dated photos showing fresh tears, clean exposed asphalt where a tab used to be, debris in the yard that wasn't there before the storm. Old roofs still get wind claims paid when the documentation is solid.

Plenty of derechos carry hail inside the strongest cells, so one storm can leave both kinds of damage on one roof. They're documented separately. Hail shows as random impacts and dented soft metals across the slopes that faced the storm. Wind shows as lifted, creased and missing shingles organized by the shape of the roof. Our page on telling wind damage from hail damage goes deeper. Most homeowner policies put both under the same wind and hail coverage with one date of loss, but check your declarations page for how your deductible applies.

Wind claims get underpaid in a particular way. The adjuster counts the missing shingles, writes up a few bundles, and misses the creased and unsealed tabs that'll fail next spring. If the inspection doesn't document those, they aren't in the scope. We photograph and mark each creased shingle, and we meet the adjuster on the roof so the count gets made together. If a repair is the right answer, that's what we'll write up. Our insurance claim page lays out the rest of the process.