Checking Your Roof from the Ground After a Storm

After a storm, the urge is to climb up and look. Resist it. A wet, wind-damaged roof is the worst place to be standing, and most of what you need to know is visible from the ground if you take your time. You are not trying to do a roofer's inspection. You are trying to answer one question: does this need urgent attention, or can it wait for a proper look?

Give yourself twenty unhurried minutes, a pair of binoculars if you have them, and a phone for photos. Walk the full perimeter of the house, not just the side facing the street. Damage hides on the back slope, over the garage, and around anything that sticks through the roof. Note what you see, take photos from the same spots, and you will have something useful to show a roofer later.

Before you look at the roof at all, look at what is around it. Downed power lines, leaning trees, and branches resting on the roof are all reasons to stay back and call for help. If a line is down anywhere near the house, keep your distance and call your utility. Do not touch a branch that is touching a line.

Stay off ladders after a storm. Wet rungs, soft ground, and gusty leftovers make even a short climb risky, and a damaged roof edge can give way underfoot. Ground level is where this check happens. If you cannot see a slope from the ground, note that gap instead of climbing to fill it. A roofer with proper fall protection can check it later.

Walk around the house once, slowly, looking up at each slope in turn. Work in the same direction every time so you do not skip a side. The garage roof and any low extension count too, and they are easy to forget because they sit below the main roofline.

Binoculars help a lot here. You are looking for shingles that are lifted, curled, cracked, or missing outright, plus dark patches where the surface layer has been stripped away. A few missing shingles on one slope is a repair. A whole slope that looks patchy or bare is a bigger conversation. Either way, photos from the ground, taken straight on rather than at a sharp angle, show a roofer far more than a description does.

What fell off the roof tells its own story. Walk the yard and the driveway and look for shingles, pieces of shingle, flashing, and bits of ridge cap. A single shingle in the grass after a hard storm is common and not a crisis on its own. A dozen, or pieces from several different spots, suggests the roof took a real hit.

Look in the gutters and at the base of downspouts too. A pile of small granules, the gritty coating from asphalt shingles, looks like coarse sand. Some granule loss is normal over a roof's life, but a sudden heavy deposit after one storm is worth noting. Bag one shingle piece if you find an intact one. It helps a roofer match the type and colour later.

Wind attacks edges first. Check whether gutters are still attached, straight, and draining, and whether any section has pulled away from the fascia board behind it. A gutter hanging by one bracket will dump water against the foundation in the next rain, so that counts as urgent even though it is not strictly roof damage.

Look at the fascia and soffit boards under the eaves for dents, cracks, or sections that have come loose. Hail and flying debris often mark these first, and they are easier to spot from the ground than shingle damage. Dents on metal vents, gutters, and flashing are also a useful clue that hail came down hard enough to bruise shingles, even if the shingles themselves look fine from below.

Flashing is the metal that seals the joints where the roof meets a wall, a chimney, or a vent, and it is where leaks usually start. From the ground, look for flashing that has lifted, bent, or gone missing around chimneys and skylights. You will not see every detail, but a piece of metal flapping in the wind is obvious, and it needs fixing before the next rain.

Check vent pipes and turbine vents for caps that have blown off or vents that now lean at an angle. Around the chimney, look for loose bricks or mortar at the top, and for a chimney cap that has shifted. A leaning chimney or a crack you can see from the ground is not a wait-and-see item. That is a call now, not after the next storm.

The outside check only tells half the story. Go into the attic if you can do so safely, with a torch, and look for damp insulation, wet rafters, and daylight showing through the roof boards. Daylight through a board means a hole, and that is urgent. Damp patches that are still wet to the touch mean water came in during this storm.

Then check ceilings on the top floor for new stains, bubbling paint, or plaster that feels soft. A stain that was not there before the storm is a leak, even if it is small and even if it is not dripping right now. Mark its outline lightly in pencil so you can tell whether it grows. If water is actively dripping, put a bucket under it, move anything valuable, and call a roofer the same day.

Sort your findings into three piles. Urgent: active leaks, holes, missing flashing, a leaning chimney, or anything electrical or structural. Get a roofer out promptly, and if water is coming in, a temporary tarp from a pro beats a DIY tarp job on a wet roof. Soon: a handful of missing shingles, a loose gutter, or a dented vent. Book a repair within days, before the next rain tests it. Watch: minor granule loss or one shingle down with no leak. Note it, photograph it, and have it checked at the next routine inspection.

When you call a roofer, lead with your photos and your notes: which slope, what you found, and whether there is water inside. That gets you a better answer than "my roof might be damaged." And if you are weighing whether a roofing pro should take the next look, remember the ground check is triage, not a substitute. For homeowners in the mountains, roofing help in Colorado covers the same storm checks, and Denver-area roofers see hail damage like this all season. If you are further east, Ohio roofing services handle the same wind and hail calls after summer storms.