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Kamloops, BC
A storm claim is not a claim about a damaged roof. It is a claim that a specific event on a specific day caused that damage — and it is won or lost on the evidence gathered in the first 48 hours, mostly from the ground.
This is the single idea that reorganises everything else on this page. An insurer is not being asked whether your roof needs work — that is obvious and uncontested. It is being asked whether the work is needed because of a covered peril that happened on a particular date, rather than because the roof has been getting older for twenty years.
Almost every declined or reduced roof claim turns on that distinction, and almost every homeowner spends the first day documenting the wrong thing. They photograph the damage in detail and record nothing about the event. The damage was never in dispute. The link was.
So write the event down before you do anything else. The date. The approximate time the weather came through. What it was doing — wind, rain rate, hail, a specific gust that you heard. What else in the neighbourhood was affected: fences down, branches across the street, a neighbour’s siding. Five minutes with a notes app, timestamped that day, is worth more to the file than another twenty photographs of the same lifted shingle.
The storm content most Kamloops homeowners read online was written for somewhere with a different problem. Coastal British Columbia roofing content is organised around sustained frontal wind and long-duration rainfall, and it tells you to expect wind uplift across whole slopes. That is not the characteristic event in this valley.
The Kamloops case is convective: short, sharp summer cells that deliver a large amount of water in a very short time, often with gusts and debris, and are done in twenty minutes. The City’s own climatic design table shows what the roof is expected to handle, and the useful thing about it is the ratio between the two rainfall figures.
Climatic design data — Kamloops rainfall
Maximum 15-minute rainfall: 13 mmCity of Kamloops Building By-law No. 11-80, Climatic Data table.
Maximum one-day rainfall: 57 mm
Read those two together. A quarter of the design day’s rainfall can arrive inside a quarter of an hour. That is a rate problem rather than a volume problem, and rate is what defeats roof drainage: a valley sized for ordinary flow overshoots its edge, a gutter that was merely slow becomes irrelevant, a slightly open flashing lap that has shed water for a decade gets more than it can turn away. Damage from a Kamloops storm is therefore often found at the drainage details rather than across the open slope — and it frequently shows up as water inside the house before anything looks wrong from the street.
Debris is the other half. Branch and limb strikes during a gust do localised, obvious damage that photographs well, and unlike wear they are unambiguously event-caused. If a branch came down, the branch is part of the file.
Work through this in order. Almost none of it requires going on the roof, and you should not go on the roof after a storm to get photographs — a compromised roof surface is exactly where people are injured.
The one thing not to do before the inspection is permanent repair. Temporary containment is expected and welcomed; a finished repair removes the evidence the assessment depends on, and puts you in the position of describing damage nobody can now see.
People assume the roofer and the adjuster are assessing the same thing and are confused when the numbers differ. They are answering different questions, and understanding that is most of the leverage available to you.
A roofer’s scope answers: what work returns this roof to a sound condition? It covers everything needing attention, whenever it arose.
An adjuster’s assessment answers: what does this policy owe for damage caused by this event? Pre-existing wear, deferred maintenance and age-related deterioration are typically outside that, even when the roofer is right that they need doing.
Both documents are legitimate, and the gap between them is not necessarily anyone acting in bad faith. But the gap is where the conversation happens, so you want both in hand rather than one. Where damage has been attributed to wear and you believe it was caused by impact, that argument has its own evidence — and it is a genuinely difficult argument to win in this climate, for reasons set out on hail damage and how it is told apart from ordinary wear.
Not every storm needs an insurer, and opening a claim is not a free option. If the likely repair cost sits near the deductible, the claim can return little or nothing after the deductible is applied, while still becoming part of your claims history.
The way to make that a decision rather than a discovery is simple: get the repair scoped and priced first, then decide. A dated written scope costs you nothing and works either way — it is the document you would have needed for the claim, and it is the document you need to authorise the repair without one. If it lands well under the deductible, you have saved yourself a claim. If it lands well over, you open the file with the evidence already assembled.
If water came in during the storm, the repair side has its own sequence that runs in parallel with all of this: contain it first, then find where it actually entered, which is covered on tracing a roof leak. And whether the resulting work needs a City building permit is settled by the same rule that governs all roofing here — set out on the roof repair page.
A written, dated scope is the document your claim needs. We’ll pass your request to a local Kamloops roofer.
Fix the date. A storm claim is a claim about a specific event, so the file needs the day and approximate time the weather happened, before anything is cleaned up or moved. Photographs taken afterwards are much easier to attribute to an event when the event itself is already recorded.
Photograph it thoroughly first, then move only what has to move for safety. A branch on the lawn is evidence that something came off the roof or landed on it. Clearing the site before it is recorded removes the link between the weather and the damage, which is the part of the claim that gets questioned.
Temporary work to prevent further damage is normally expected and should be photographed and receipted. Permanent repairs before the inspection are a different matter, because they remove the evidence the assessment depends on. Contain, record, then wait for the inspection before the permanent scope is built.
Three distances for every item. A wide shot that identifies the house and the location on the roof, a mid shot that shows the damaged area in its surroundings, and a close shot of the damage itself with something in frame for scale. Isolated close-ups with no context are the weakest evidence in a file.
No, and the difference is worth understanding. A roofer scopes the work needed to return the roof to a sound condition. An adjuster assesses what the policy covers for the damage caused by that event, which can exclude pre-existing wear. The two documents answer different questions, and both belong in the file.
When the likely cost of the repair is close to the deductible, the claim can cost more than it returns once the deductible and any effect on future premiums are counted. Getting a repair scope priced before the claim is opened lets that be a decision rather than a discovery.