Resources · Wind damage
Wind and hail share a line on the policy and a page on the estimate, and they behave nothing alike. Hail comes down and bruises the surface it lands on. Wind gets under an edge and pulls. What each leaves behind is different, and so is the argument that follows.
The peril usually reads as one thing. Windstorm or hail, one named cause covering two events with little in common.
Hail strikes from above, and the argument is about bruised mat and what a chalked test square recorded. That ground is covered on the hail page.
Wind doesn't strike. It works at the edges and under them, and the question becomes whether what's still up there is doing its job.
This page is an informational overview of how wind losses get valued. It isn't legal advice, and your policy's exact language controls everything described below. Ironclad Assessment Group serves as a neutral appraiser and umpire. We're not a public adjuster, and we don't adjust, negotiate, interpret your policy, or settle your claim.
Wind lifts, creases, and removes. Those are separate conditions with separate consequences, and a valuation accounts for each on its own terms.
Two things hold a shingle down. Nails through the fastener line, and a strip of factory adhesive bonding each tab to the course beneath once heat sets it. Wind pulls at that assembly rather than pressing on it, and the pull concentrates at the edges, so rakes, eaves, ridges, and hips see what the middle of a plane doesn't.
A tab that lifts and drops back down is the mild version, and it's still an argument. Where the seal released without tearing, warm weather can re-bond it. Where the strip tore or collected dust while it stood open, whether the bond that forms afterward is the one the factory made is exactly what gets argued.
Creasing is a different condition. A tab folded back on itself may not unfold cleanly. Where the asphalt and the mat take a line at the fold, it can stay after the tab lies flat. A crease isn't a scuff. It's a place where the shingle's remaining integrity is in question.
Nobody disputes what removal looks like. A tab that's gone is gone, though how far the replacement reaches is its own argument. Wind arrives from a bearing, so a wind file reads as a pattern. Windward planes and rake edges take the uplift, and the planes behind the ridge often come through untouched, which is information rather than an absence.
Most wind files come down to one question about one thing. A tab that's unsealed and still in place.
One position holds that the shingle is intact. Nothing is torn, nothing is creased, nothing is missing, and there's no water path that wasn't there the week before. Seal strips are set by heat, and roofs bond and re-bond through a summer as a matter of course. Replacing a shingle that sits where it was installed, doing what it was installed to do, funds a new roof out of a condition that may resolve on its own. Cold-weather installation, foot traffic, adhesive age, and heavy shade all produce unsealed tabs, and none of those is a storm.
The other position holds that the seal isn't a detail. It's half the attachment. Nails hold the head of the shingle, and the adhesive holds the tab, which faces the weather and keeps wind-driven rain from tracking up under the course. On that reading, a shingle whose bond has failed no longer performs the way the product was designed and tested to perform. It lifts again at a lower speed than it took to lift it the first time. Damage doesn't have to mean a hole. And a bond formed later, in the field, on a weathered surface carrying granules, isn't the bond a machine laid down at the plant.
Both are argued in good faith and argued constantly, which is why these files stall. Somebody still has to put a number on the roof.
The dispute takes a practical shape on the estimate, and it has a name. Hand-sealing, a bead of asphalt cement worked under a lifted tab to hold it down.
To one estimator it's the proportionate answer. The tab is whole, sealing restores its attachment, the line item exists in the estimating software with a price attached, and a full replacement prices a loss the roof didn't take.
To another estimator it's no repair at all. A hand-placed bead where a continuous factory strip used to be isn't the same attachment, and it goes onto a surface that has weathered since installation. What the manufacturer says about field sealing belongs in the record.
Estimators haven't settled this between themselves, and an estimate rarely says which assumption it made.
Sooner or later a wind file meets a version of this sentence. The tabs are lifted because the roof is old, not because of the storm.
Something real sits underneath it. Asphalt stiffens as it ages, and a shingle that has given up its oils creases where a newer one flexes. An older roof answers wind differently, and both sides know it.
When a carrier accepts a claim but attributes lifted or missing tabs to age and prior condition rather than to the event, the dispute sits on contested ground. Whether a causation argument belongs inside appraisal or outside it depends on the wording of the clause in front of you and on the facts of the file. There isn't one settled answer to point you to.
We won't tell you which side of that line your claim falls on, and nobody selling you an appraisal should. It's the question to put to a policyholder-side insurance attorney before you spend money going down either path, because the deadlines in a property policy keep running.
A wind valuation gets built from a narrower record than a hail one. Recorded wind speeds for the date of loss sit at the front, though they settle nothing alone, since what a station some distance off registered isn't what crossed one roof.
Then comes the directional work, documented plane by plane rather than summarized, so either the pattern lines up with a bearing or it doesn't.
Photographs carry the rest. A crease reads only when the light and the angle cooperate, and seal condition reads only when the tab and what sits under it are in one frame. The manufacturer and line of what's installed matter too, since seal design and wind ratings vary by product.
All of it gets priced at what the work costs around Columbus, not at a national average.
The mechanics don't change for wind. A written demand invokes the clause, each side names an appraiser with no financial stake in the result, and what the two can't close goes to an umpire. That's walked out step by step on its own page.
What a panel decides is the amount of a covered loss. It doesn't decide coverage, and it doesn't interpret what your policy requires.
Where tabs came off a single plane and the rest of the roof has weathered, whether the new work reads as new from the street becomes its own argument. That one has a page of its own.
Our fee is set in writing before the engagement begins and never depends on the size of the award. That's what keeps the number credible. Nobody bought it. The full picture of what we do as appraiser and umpire is on the services page.
That's the argument on most wind files, and it has no single answer. One side reads a shingle still in place, uncreased and untorn, as undamaged, and expects the seal to re-bond in warm weather. The other reads a failed seal as damage whether or not the shingle moved. Both get argued in good faith. Where the disagreement is about the work and what it costs, that's an amount question.
That can be an amount question, since it's a disagreement about the work and what it costs, and pricing both versions is inside what a panel does. If the argument becomes whether your policy pays for a replacement at all, that's coverage, and a panel doesn't reach it.
No. Appraisal decides the amount of a covered loss, not whether a loss is covered. A denial is a coverage question, and coverage questions belong with a policyholder-side insurance attorney. Don't let the deadlines run while you think it over.
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