St. Louis metro · the wind log
Storm Damage Roof Repair, St. Louis: On Your Roof Tomorrow
Shingles in the yard, ridge cap on the drive, a gutter hanging at one end. Ring the office and you get a straight answer today about whether the roof is open and needs covering tonight or whether it can wait until Thursday, and a person up there with a camera after that. What you keep is a dated photograph set, measurements slope by slope and a written scope, in your hand before an adjuster ever climbs a ladder.
Keys Roofing · roofing, gutters and downspouts · greater St. Louis
Atlas and Malarkey shingles · licensed and insured
The readings
The National Weather Service put the peak wind of the tornado that started near Clayton at 2:41 in the afternoon at 152 miles an hour.
Along a 22.6 mile track. It is the widest tornado path this region holds in a record that begins in 1950. Five people were killed.
Filed across the 2025 season, with more than $2.9 billion paid and roughly 83 percent of it residential, per the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance.
Individual assistance approvals in St. Louis City and County, carrying $58.13 million in housing and other needs and $105.01 million in public assistance.
Sources, so you can check them: wind speed and path are National Weather Service survey findings, the claim count is the state insurance regulator counting claims filed rather than roofs replaced, and the FEMA figures are federal assistance to households rather than private settlements. Two hundred and fifty three thousand catastrophe claims went in across one Missouri season. The roofs that came out of it well were the ones photographed and measured early, by somebody who wrote down what they saw.
What to do first
A wind roof is a clock, and it started last night
Wind does not hide what it did. It lifts the shingle, breaks the seal holding one course onto the next, folds the tab back and drops it again, and sometimes carries the tab off to the lawn. Ridge cap goes first, then the rakes, then the corners, then whatever was already loose. You do not need anybody to prove a roof lost material. You need to know whether it is open tonight, and who is going to be up there in the morning.
Open means water can get in before you wake up: a bare patch of decking, a torn valley, a missing boot. That is a same day phone call and a tarp. Everything else runs on a shorter clock than it feels like, because the next front comes through this metro on its own schedule and every day of delay is a day the evidence gets muddier and the schedule gets fuller.
So ring the office, say what you can see from the ground, and get a person on the roof with a camera. The rest of this desk is the week laid out in order, for reading in the quiet bits.
| Wind | Hail | |
|---|---|---|
| Visible from the ground | Usually. Missing tabs, lifted courses, ridge cap gone, debris in the yard. | Rarely. Bruising and granule loss sit below what the eye resolves at thirty feet. |
| When it leaks | Can be the same night. A roof with tabs gone is open. | Typically two to six years later, after freeze and thaw work the fracture open. |
| What matters first | Stopping water and making the roof safe to leave overnight. | Getting a dated photographic record before the next storm muddies it. |
| The failure mode | Mechanical. The seal strip lets go and the mat creases at the fold. | Material. The mat fractures and the granule layer that shields the asphalt thins. |
| The usual mistake | Climbing up on a wet, unsealed roof in the dark. | Deciding nothing happened because nothing looks wrong. |
Hail is the other half, and it hides. That one wants a ladder sooner.
The order it runs in
The first week, compressed
The full version, with the reasoning under each move, is on its own page. This is the shape of it.
-
H+00
While it is still blowing, stay in
Nothing on the roof gets better because you looked at it in the dark. Put pots under the drips, move what matters out from under them, and photograph the inside of the house while it is happening. Those interior photographs, taken at an hour you can prove, are worth more than anything you will get from the ladder.
-
H+01
Walk the perimeter at first light, from the ground
Wide shots of every elevation, then close ones. Shingles in the yard, ridge cap on the drive, a gutter hanging at one end, a downspout crushed by a limb. Pick up nothing until it is photographed where it landed.
-
H+06
Decide whether the roof is open
Open means water can get in tonight. A bare patch of decking, a torn valley, a missing boot, a hole. If it is open, that is a same day call and a tarp, not a Thursday appointment.
-
DAY 1
Read your policy before anybody hands you a contract
Find the deductible, find the condition about protecting the property from further damage, and find out whether the roof is settled on replacement cost or actual cash value. Fifteen minutes of reading changes every conversation that follows.
-
DAY 2
Get somebody up there who will write down what they saw
A documented inspection means photographs, measurements by slope, and a written scope you keep. A verbal number in the driveway is not any of that.
-
DAY 7
Check the ceilings again, and the basement
Water moves slowly through insulation and drywall, and the stain that was not there on Tuesday shows up on Sunday. Meanwhile the debris a storm dumped in the gutters is quietly moving the roof's water to the wrong side of the foundation.
The rule most storm advertising breaks
Two sentences that tell you to close the door
The week after a wind event is when the yard signs go up and the trucks start driving the streets, and a great deal of what gets offered on a doorstep in this metro is not lawful to offer. Learn the two offers and you can sort the trucks from the roofers in the first minute, on your own step, before you have signed anything.
A contractor shall not represent or negotiate, or offer or advertise to represent or negotiate, on behalf of an owner or possessor of real estate on any insurance claim in connection with the repair or replacement of roof systems. RSMo 407.725, Missouri Revised Statutes
A separate subsection of the same statute forbids a roofing contractor to advertise or promise to absorb, rebate, waive or otherwise take care of any part of an insurance deductible. A violation of either is an unfair practice under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, which carries private exposure, not just a regulatory letter.
So the crew that offers to fight the insurer for you, to get the claim approved, or to make the deductible disappear is not being unusually helpful. Missouri law bars a roofing contractor from making any of those offers, and a company comfortable making them anyway has told you something useful about how it operates before it ever gets on your roof.
What Keys does instead is the part that actually moves a storm roof along. Somebody climbs it, photographs every slope, measures it, and writes a scope naming the damage and the repair, and that file is in your hand before an adjuster arrives rather than after. When the adjuster does come out, the contractor is on the roof with them, pointing at the thing being discussed. That is faster, it is checkable, and most of the crews working your street this month cannot produce it. See what the record looks like.
The desk
Ten pages, each one a thing somebody rang up and asked
If a storm crossed your street last night, make the call first and read entry one while you wait. The rest keeps.
The first week, hour by hour
From the hour it is still blowing through to the seventh day, in order: what to photograph, what to move, what to read, what to sign, and the two things that are much harder to undo than they look. The spine of this desk.
Read Entry 02Emergency tarping
How a tarp is actually fastened, why it puts new holes in the roof on purpose, how many weeks it is good for, and the four situations where it is the wrong answer entirely.
Read Entry 03What wind does to a shingle
Uplift, the seal strip, and the crease. Why a shingle that folded back and lay down again is finished even though it looks flat, and why the corners and rakes go first.
Read Entry 04Straight line wind and the 2025 tornado
Downbursts, derechos, and how a survey team tells a tornado from straight line wind by reading which way the debris fell. Plus what the May 16 2025 event actually was.
Read Entry 05When a limb comes down
The three cases, in rising order of seriousness, and why the limb resting on the roof is the one that needs an arborist before it needs a roofer.
Read Entry 06Once water is inside
Why the stain is never directly under the hole, how to release a bulging ceiling on purpose, and the one circumstance that means switching the power off before anything else.
Read Entry 07Documenting the damage
The record you should be holding within days of the storm: wide and close photographs by elevation, measurements slope by slope, and a written scope naming every item, cross referenced to the pictures.
Read Entry 08Gutters and downspouts after a storm
The debris slug, the crushed downspout, the hanger that pulled out under a wet load, and the last ten feet of the water's journey that nobody in this market sells.
Read Entry 09Permits and the repair
When St. Louis County wants a permit and when it does not, why the municipality matters more than the county, and the state licence Missouri has never actually adopted.
Read Entry 10Storm questions
Twelve real ones, including door knockers, half roofs, an eighteen year old roof the wind finished off, and the Missouri deductible tax credit that stops taking new credits on 15 October 2026, which is now weeks away.
ReadScope of work
What you can put Keys on this week
Roofing, gutters and downspouts, in greater St. Louis, with the company's own name on the work. Not siding, not windows, not commercial, not general contracting, not tree work. The short list is the point: a longer one is how a storm crew ends up handing your roof to a subcontractor you never met.
- Temporary protection on a roof that is open, so the house survives the next front
- Wind repair: replacing lost and creased shingles, re-bedding ridge cap, resetting flashing
- Full tear-off and replacement, with decking replaced wherever the boards have gone soft
- Documented storm inspections: photographs, measurements by slope, a written scope you keep
- Seamless gutter rolled on site, guards, resealing, re-hanging a run the wind pulled loose
- Downspout repairs, reroutes, extensions and buried drainage to a proper outlet
Shingles are Atlas and Malarkey. The drainage line is the unusual one: most roofing companies in this metro stop at the gutter and let the water find its own way from there, which after a storm it usually does, into a basement, in the same spring the new roof went on.
Report a storm roof
Tell us what the roof did and we ring you back today
Greater St. Louis. Roofing, gutters and downspouts. Send it and the office rings you the same working day to settle one question: same day tarp, or a ladder on it this week. If water is coming in right now, phone instead, because a form does not wake anybody up.
Faster: skip the form and ring the office now (314) 220-2333
What happens after you send it
Three steps, the first one today, none of them a salesman at your door tonight
- The office rings you back and asks what you can see from the ground. That call settles whether this is a same day problem or a Thursday one, and it costs nothing either way.
- Somebody comes out, climbs it, photographs it, measures it and writes down what was found slope by slope. That file is yours the day it is finished, whatever you decide to do next, and it exists before an adjuster is standing in your drive.
- You decide. If you are filing on your policy, the filing and every conversation with your insurer are yours, because RSMo 407.725 bars a Missouri roofing contractor from representing or negotiating you on a claim.
Water coming in tonight, ring now
(314) 220-2333Three that come up every time
Asked in the first week, most weeks
Should I get up on the roof myself after a storm?
No. A wet shingle roof is slick, a wind event leaves lifted and unsealed shingles that slide under a boot without warning, and after a storm there may be a fallen conductor touching the gutter or the service mast. Almost everything worth knowing in the first day can be seen from the ground with a phone camera and a bit of patience.
How is wind damage different from hail damage?
Hail hides and wind announces itself. Hail bruises the mat under the surface and thins the granule layer, both invisible from the ground and often invisible for years. Wind lifts shingles and creases them, tears tabs off and strips ridge cap, which usually leaves something you can see from the driveway and something in the yard. That difference changes what you do first: a wind roof is frequently open to the weather tonight, and a hail roof almost never is.
Will Keys speak to my insurer for me?
No, and RSMo 407.725 bars every roofing contractor in Missouri from representing or negotiating a property owner on an insurance claim, so a company that offers to is advertising something the statute forbids. What Keys does is climb the roof, photograph it, measure it, write a scope, and be on site as the contractor when an adjuster comes out. The claim stays yours.