What to Do After a Storm Damages Your Roof in Tampa Bay
A step-by-step guide for homeowners: what to do in the first 24 hours, how to document damage, and how to get the roof looked at by a licensed roofer you can find again.
Step 1: Safety first
Do not climb on your roof. Wet shingles, loose debris, and compromised structure make it genuinely dangerous, and every storm season somebody in Tampa Bay gets hurt doing exactly this. Stay on the ground.
A few other things worth saying out loud. Do not go near standing water that could be touching anything electrical. Do not try to tarp your own roof in wind, which is how people end up off a ladder. If you can see sky through the ceiling or the roof deck is visibly sagging, get everyone out of that part of the house and call someone.
Step 2: Document from the ground
- Take wide-angle photos of each side of the house
- Photograph any obvious damage — missing shingles, fallen branches, dented gutters
- Time-stamp everything. Phones do this automatically; keep the metadata intact
Step 3: Deal with the water inside
While you wait on a roofer, limit what the water can ruin. Move furniture and electronics out from under any active drip, pull up rugs, and put a bucket under it. If a ceiling is holding water in a bulge, that water is going to come down eventually and it is safer to relieve it deliberately into a bucket than to let it take the whole ceiling.
Photograph the inside too, not just the roof. Interior staining tells a roofer something the exterior does not, and it is easy to forget once it dries.
What storm damage actually looks like on a Tampa roof
Most real storm damage here is not a hole. It is subtler than people expect, which is why so much of it gets missed until it leaks months later.
- Lifted edges and ridge. Downburst wind gets under a rake edge or a poorly nailed ridge and peels from the edge inward. This is the signature inland failure and it often leaves the field of the roof looking untouched.
- Creased shingles. A shingle that was lifted and laid back down can sit perfectly flat with its mat already broken. It will fail, just not today.
- Stripped granules. Look in the gutters and at the bottom of downspouts. Granules in quantity mean the surface took a beating.
- Split pipe boots and pulled flashing. The rubber collars around vent pipes are the most fragile thing up there, and wall and chimney flashing gets worked loose.
- Impact marks from limbs and debris, which matter most where they have broken the surface rather than just scuffed it.
One thing worth knowing: water travels. The stain on your ceiling is very often not underneath where the water actually got in. That is the main reason a from-the-ground guess about what happened is usually wrong, in both directions.
Step 4: Have a licensed roofer look at it
A licensed roofer can tell you what the storm actually did, what needs attention now, and what can wait. Allstar inspections are free and take about 20 minutes, with no obligation afterward: we pull a full aerial imagery report, a crew member gets on the roof in person and photographs it top to bottom, and you get a written, itemized estimate, usually the same day. If the roof came through fine, we will tell you that.
Step 5: Use a licensed, insured contractor you can find again
Storm chasers show up in Tampa Bay within days of anything newsworthy, and the pattern is consistent: out-of-state plates, a magnetic door sign, pressure to sign something today, and no way to reach them in year 3 when the repair fails. Slow down. There is almost never a reason to sign anything the day someone knocks.
Two checks take five minutes and screen out most of it:
- Look up the license. Every Florida contractor has a public license number. Allstar is CCC1337558, verifiable at myfloridalicense.com. If someone will not give you a number, that is your answer.
- Find the local address. Not a PO box, not a truck. Somebody who has been here 20 years and intends to be here in 10 more has an address and a reputation to protect.
What we can and cannot do for you
Worth being straight about, because it comes up after every storm and a lot of roofers are vague on it.
We are roofers, and we stay in our lane. What we can do is get on the roof, document its condition with photographs, and report its remaining useful life, which licensed roofing contractors were specifically authorized to do under Fla. Stat. §627.7011(5) as amended by HB 1611 in July 2024. Anything that has to be signed by somebody else, we will tell you and line that person up.
What we cannot do is sign the OIR-B1-1802 wind mitigation form. Florida reserves that for Division I contractors, licensed home inspectors, professional engineers, and architects, and Allstar holds a Certified Roofing Contractor license, which is Division II. If you need a wind mit, we will say so and line up an independent inspector rather than pretending otherwise.
Emergency? Call us directly
Allstar Roofing keeps emergency response crews on call during storm season. (813) 522-6912.
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