First 72 Hours After Roof Storm Damage: A Macomb Plan

A storm does its damage in minutes. What happens to your roof, your ceiling, and your wallet over the following weeks is decided by what you do in the seventy-two hours right after it. That is not a scare line, it is just how the physics and the paperwork both work. Water that sits gets absorbed by wood that was fine an hour earlier. Evidence that goes undocumented gets harder to prove once the yard is raked and the shingles are swept off the driveway. And a homeowner who has a written record, a stabilized roof, and a scheduled inspection by day three is in a completely different position than one who is still deciding what to do a week later. This page is a plan for those three days, written the same straight way we write every figure on our honest pricing sheet: what to do, in what order, and where the roofing side of this stops and the insurance side begins.

01 / THE SHAPE OF ITWhy the first 72 hours matter more than any day after

Three separate clocks start running the moment the storm passes, and all three favor moving early. The damage clock runs first: a roof that is open to the sky or a ceiling with an active drip gets worse with every hour of exposure, not just every day, because water follows gravity into insulation, drywall, and framing that were dry a moment before. The evidence clock runs second: storm debris gets raked up, lifted shingles settle back down in the sun, and neighbors' cleanup crews reshape yards within a day or two, all of which makes it harder to prove exactly what the storm did versus what was already there. The scheduling clock runs third: after a widespread event, every homeowner on the block reaches for the phone at once, and the roofers who called first get the earliest inspection slots.

None of the three days above requires you to climb a ladder, patch a shingle, or decide anything about a claim. The entire job across all seventy-two hours is protecting people, protecting the structure, building a record, and getting the right professionals lined up in the right order. Everything past that point, the actual repair scope and the insurance question, is easier to get right once these three days are handled well. If you only have a few minutes right now, skip ahead to the safety sweep and the indoor check, then come back for the rest once the house is calm.

02 / HOUR ONEThe safety sweep comes before anything on the roof

Before you think about shingles, walk the property with one question in mind: is anything here dangerous right now. Most storm-damaged homes in Macomb County are safe to be in and around within minutes of the wind dying down, but the exceptions are the ones that matter most, and they get worse the longer they sit.

• Downed or sagging power lines. Treat every line on or near the ground as live. Keep people and pets well back, do not touch a fence or a metal gate a line is resting on, and call the utility company rather than moving it yourself.
• Hanging or broken limbs over the roof or driveway. A limb caught in a tree or resting on a damaged section of roof can come down without warning. Keep vehicles and people out from under it and treat that area of the roof as off-limits until a professional clears it.
• The smell of gas, or hissing near a meter or line. Leave the area immediately, do not flip any switch, and call 911 and the gas utility from a safe distance.
• Structural warning signs. A sagging or bulging ceiling, a visibly dipping roofline, new cracks in walls, or doors and windows that suddenly stick or will not close are all reasons to close that room off and treat the rest of the assessment as a wait-and-call situation rather than a walk-through.

If any of those four are present, the safety sweep is the entire first hour, and that is the correct outcome. Everything else on this page, the indoor check, the photos, the tarp call, waits for a professional or a utility crew to clear the hazard first. If the property clears the sweep, which is the common case, move straight into the indoor check while the details are fresh.

03 / GO INSIDE FIRSTThe indoor check, before you go outside

It feels backwards to go inside before you look at the roof, but the indoor check tells you how urgent this actually is, and it is the fastest way to find out whether water is already moving through the house. Start at the top of the house and work down.

• The attic, if you can safely reach it. Bring a flashlight, step only on the joists, and look for wet insulation, water beading on the underside of the deck, a fresh stain on the sheathing, or actual daylight showing through where none should be. Daylight in the attic after a storm usually means missing shingles or a punctured deck directly above.
• Every ceiling on the top floor. Walk each room and look for a new stain, a soft or bulging patch, or an active drip. A small, firm bulge full of trapped water is usually safer relieved through one small hole at its lowest point, drained into a bucket, than left to find its own way down through a light fixture. A wide sag or cracking plaster means leave it, close the door, and keep people out.
• Around windows, skylights, and chimneys from inside. Wind-driven rain finds these openings before it finds an open field of shingles, so a damp windowsill or a stain running down an interior chimney chase is a real clue even when the roof from the ground looks fine.
• Outlets, fixtures, and switches near any wet area. If water is anywhere near an electrical fixture, cut that circuit at the breaker before you go near it, and do not test a wet switch.

If you find active water, contain it before you do anything else. Move furniture and belongings out from under the drip, set a bucket or a tote to catch it, and lay towels or plastic sheeting to protect the floor. That is not a repair and it is not meant to be one; it is buying hours until a crew can stabilize the roof properly. Contained water damages far less than water left to spread, and taking these reasonable steps is exactly the kind of action a homeowners policy expects, which our guide on the duty to document and protect storm damage covers from the insurance side.

04 / THE GROUND-LEVEL PASSNow go outside, and stay off the roof

With the house checked from the inside, walk the outside next, and do the whole loop rather than glancing from the driveway. Cover all four elevations, front, both sides, and the back, standing far enough back to see each full slope. Wind and hail rarely hit a roof evenly, so the slope you cannot see from the street is often the one that took the worst of it.

• Missing, torn, or visibly lifted shingles, and dark rectangles where a tab is gone entirely
• A limb, branch debris, or anything else resting on the roof itself
• Dented gutters, downspouts, vent caps, or turbine vents, which flag hail even when the shingles look intact from a distance
• Granules collected in the gutters or at the downspout outlet, a sign of shingle wear from wind or hail
• Sagging or detached gutter sections, and any visible gap at the ridge or along a valley

A phone camera zoomed all the way in, or a basic pair of binoculars, turns a vague impression into something you can point to and photograph. Do the full guide to this pass, including which elevations to check and what a zoomed detail actually reveals, in our companion article on how to check your roof for storm damage from the ground. The one rule that applies the entire time: this pass happens with both feet on the ground. Loose granules act like ball bearings underfoot, a storm-damaged surface may not hold weight the way it normally would, and getting on your own roof to confirm what a photo already told you is one of the more common ways homeowners turn one problem into two.

05 / THE RECORDPhotograph and document everything, before you clean up

The moment you start raking the yard or sweeping the driveway, some of the evidence starts to disappear. So before any cleanup, before you drag a branch off the lawn or toss a piece of shingle in the trash, shoot a full photo and video pass. This step costs a few minutes and pays off for weeks.

• Every elevation of the roof from the ground, wide shots that show the whole slope and zoomed shots of specific damage
• Debris exactly where it landed, fallen limbs, shingle pieces, dented metal, before you move any of it
• Every interior sign of water, stains, active drips, a bulge, wet insulation, and any damaged belongings
• Wide context shots that place the damage on your specific house and street, and a short video if water is actively coming in
• Collateral yard damage, torn screens, dented air conditioner fins, a dinged mailbox, which corroborates that a real storm reached your property

Keep a running note alongside the photos: the date and rough time of the storm, when you first noticed the damage, and any receipts for buckets, tarps, plastic sheeting, or a hotel night if the house was unsafe. Our dedicated guide on how to document roof storm damage walks the full technique, including the shots an adjuster actually wants to see. None of this is about building a legal case; it is about making sure the truth of what happened this week is not lost by next week. Whether the damage turns out to be covered is a separate question for section seven.

06 / STOP THE BLEEDINGProtect the opening: tarping, not a fix

If your ground and indoor checks turned up bare decking, a hole, a large missing patch of shingles, or daylight through the attic, the roof needs to be covered before the next rain, and that is a job for a trained crew, not a homeowner on a ladder. Our one around-the-clock service is 24/7 emergency tarping, for roofs that are actively open to the weather.

Not every storm hit needs a tarp tonight. If the shingles are gone in places but the underlayment underneath is intact and the interior stayed dry, you often have a day or two of margin rather than hours, and a fast-scheduled repair beats an overnight tarp call. That is one of many reasons the exposure question matters: our guide on how long exposed underlayment can wait walks through what changes the answer, including weather in the forecast and how much of the deck is showing. Waiting past what the exposure actually allows is exactly how a manageable hit turns into a bigger repair, a pattern covered in full in our guide on how storm damage gets worse the longer it sits.

07 / DAY TWO AND THREEThe real look, and the handoff

Day one is the plan above: safety, the indoor check, the exterior pass, the photos, and a tarp call if the roof is open. Day two is when a trained set of eyes needs to get on the roof and into the attic, because a ground check and a flashlight, however careful, cannot see everything a storm can do to a shingle mat, a flashing detail, or a run of underlayment. That is what a free, no-obligation inspection is for. We check the shingles, the flashing, the ventilation, the gutters, and the attic side of the deck, and photograph everything we find. If the roof only needs a repair, most storm damage does, that is exactly what we tell you, and repairs in Macomb County run $350 to $3,200, with larger or complex repairs running higher.

Day three is where the folder gets finished and one decision gets made, not by us. If the storm damage looks like it may be covered, homeowners insurance generally addresses sudden events like wind and hail rather than gradual wear, and every policy reads differently, so the question of whether and how to file belongs with you, your policy, and your adjuster. We can document what we find and can meet your adjuster on site to walk the roof together, but no contractor can promise how a claim resolves. The full playbook for that decision, from first call to final invoice, lives on our storm and insurance claims page, and it picks up exactly where this three-day plan leaves off.

One more local note worth keeping in the folder: Macomb County has recent history with severe wind, and the storms of August 2023 brought federal disaster declaration DR-4757 to the county. Events on that scale lift shingles and break seals in ways that are invisible from the ground and only show themselves the next time it rains, which is one more reason a professional look on day two beats waiting to see if a small problem announces itself on its own. If you want a ballpark on the repair or replacement math before anyone visits, the instant estimator and the cost calculator both run the same published ranges on our pricing page.