Emergency Roof Repair
The tarp is not the repair. It is a clock, and it runs for weeks rather than seasons. Emergency roof repair — the permanent work that follows the emergency — is a different job from the one that made the building safe on the night, and confusing the two is how a family ends up living under blue plastic for eight months. APC Roofing handles both stages for buildings in Florida, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri. This page is about the second one: how sudden damage gets scoped, dried, sequenced and repaired properly once the water has stopped coming in.
What temporary protection is actually for
A mechanically fastened tarp or a boarded opening buys the time needed to do the permanent repair correctly, in daylight, with the right materials on hand and a proper scope agreed. It is not a way of deferring the work until the next storm finds the same hole. Every week spent under temporary cover is a week the soaked material underneath is not drying out, and wet structure does not improve with patience. Tarps also degrade: the plastic goes brittle in ultraviolet light, the fastening works loose in wind, and the failure tends to come during the next storm rather than on a calm afternoon when somebody would notice. Treat the tarp as a deadline you have been given rather than a problem you have solved.
Scoping starts underneath the damage
Sudden damage is nearly always wider than the visible hole. Before a number is written, enough of the assembly has to be opened to see how far the water travelled and what it reached: decking that has swollen or delaminated, saturated insulation, corroded fasteners, framing that needs drying or reinforcing, and underlayment well beyond the impact point. On a low-slope roof water spreads sideways between membrane and insulation and can surface many feet from where it entered. On a steep-slope roof it runs down the underside of the sheathing and drops off at the first obstacle. A price written from the ground, with nobody looking underneath, is a price that will change — which is why the honest version of this work is scoped once, properly, rather than quoted fast and revised twice.
Dry it before you close it
This is the step that gets skipped under time pressure, and it is the one that determines whether the repair holds. Wet material sealed under a new roof surface does not dry. It rots, and it grows mould in the dark where nobody looks for years. So the order matters: strip out what is saturated, dry what can be saved with air movement, dehumidification and time, and confirm it with a meter rather than by touch — framing lumber should be back down under roughly sixteen to nineteen percent moisture content before anything is closed over it. Only then rebuild. Interior work — insulation, drywall, paint — follows the roof and is normally a separate trade. A roofing contractor promising to make your ceiling look new again is promising outside its own scope, and that promise is usually where the disputes start.
Insurance runs alongside the repair, not instead of it
Storm claims move on their own timeline, generally in weeks and months rather than days, while the building needs decisions now. Keep the emergency mitigation invoice and the permanent repair estimate as separate documents, because most policies treat reasonable emergency measures differently from permanent repair. Expect an adjuster's first scope to miss things that only appear once material is removed; that is precisely what a supplement is for, and photographs taken during the work are what support it. Photograph everything before it is covered. And keep the roles apart: you own the claim, the contractor prices the work, and nobody should be asking you to sign over control of one in exchange for getting the other done.
Repair now, or replace slightly later
An emergency does not automatically mean a new roof, and it does not automatically mean a patch either. A tree through one plane of a ten-year-old roof is a repair by any measure. Wind that stripped three slopes off a covering already near the end of its life is a replacement, and repairing it is paying twice for one outcome. The four things that settle it are the same ones that settle any repair-or-replace question: how much service life the covering had left before the event, how many slopes are involved, whether the deck stayed dry, and whether a matching material still exists to repair with. Those are answerable from evidence rather than opinion, and they should be answered before the scope is written rather than after the first invoice.
