The morning after a wind or hail event, the work changes shape. In an ordinary week I look at two or three roofs a day and have time to write each one up properly. The morning after a storm there are nine addresses on one street, everybody called inside the same hour, and most of them want somebody up there today. Storm damage documentation is the part of that week people get wrong, because it feels like paperwork while the phone is still ringing.
It is not paperwork. It is the only version of that roof that will exist after the tarp goes on, the ridge gets replaced, and eight months go by. Whatever you did not record on the first visit is gone, and nobody can go back for it.
Why a storm week is not a normal inspection week
Four things are different, and they all pull in the same direction.
Volume. You are not doing one careful walk. You are doing thirty walks in six days, and the thirtieth has to be as good as the first.
Time pressure. Homeowners who waited two hours on the phone do not want to hear about a slot next Thursday. The temptation is to go fast by skipping the parts nobody is watching, which are exactly the parts that matter later. Nobody skips the interesting slope. What gets skipped is the sentence explaining what you were looking at, and the four minutes on the side of the house where nothing happened.
The whole street at once. Thirty roofs in one subdivision, possibly walked by three different inspectors, will be looked at side by side eventually. If one inspector shoots wide photos and another shoots close-ups, the set reads as three different opinions rather than one survey.
The roof keeps changing. Tarps go on. A neighbor's crew replaces a ridge. It rains again on Thursday. The condition you saw on Tuesday morning is not available on Friday, and no amount of care later brings it back.
What storm damage documentation has to carry
Strip away the arguing and there are four things a record has to contain to be worth anything to somebody who was not standing there. When it was made. The whole roof, not just the slope that got hit. The parts that are fine. Who saw it. Everything else is detail.
One: when it was made
A date matters more after a storm than at any other time, because the roof is being altered by everyone including you. A recording that starts on its own and carries its own timestamp settles the sequence without anybody having to remember it. A photo pulled off a phone eight months later does not, or at least not in a way anyone can follow. What timestamps do and do not settle is worked through in timestamps that hold up.
The practical version: get the recording running before you set the ladder, not after you find something interesting.
Two: the whole roof, not just the bad slope
Under pressure, everyone shoots the dramatic slope and comes down. That is a record of your conclusion, not a record of the roof. Somebody reading it later cannot tell whether the north slope was fine or was never looked at, and those two things look identical in an incomplete file.
Walk every slope in the same order every time. Say which slope you are on out loud as you step onto it. Include the elevations, the gutters, the soft metals, and the penetrations, even on the sides where nothing happened. The general method is laid out in roof inspection documentation; a storm week does not change the method, it just makes skipping steps more tempting.
Three: the parts that are fine
A record that shows only defects is a record nobody can calibrate. If the west slope is clean, film the west slope being clean and say so. If the shingles were already at the end of their life before anything happened, that belongs in the record too, in your own voice, on the same day.
The same goes for work somebody else did earlier. An old patch, a repair with the wrong color shingle, a vent that was never sealed properly. Record it plainly, without a verdict attached, and it stops being an argument eight months from now. Leave it out and the whole file looks selective, including the parts you got right.
This is the discipline most people drop first when they are behind, and it is the one that makes the rest credible. There is a whole argument for it in photographing what is not wrong.
Four: who saw it
An observation with a name attached beats an anonymous photo. Who was on the roof, who was in the driveway, who was watching from work. When the homeowner watches the walk live on their phone, that fact is part of the record: they were present for it, in real time, and they heard the same narration you gave.
That is the piece that removes most of the follow-up. A homeowner who watched the north slope get walked does not call on Thursday to ask whether the north slope got walked. The mechanics of that, from the texted link to the recording landing with the company, are on the how it works page.
Doing all four in a week you did not plan for
The four requirements sound like more work. In a storm week they are less work, but only if the tooling does them by itself.
Recording that starts automatically means nobody decides, at address twenty-three at four in the afternoon, whether this one is worth filming. A fixed walk order means the narration writes itself. A viewer link that the homeowner taps without installing anything means the driveway conversation happens once instead of twice. Getting three inspectors to produce one consistent set is its own problem, handled in standardizing across inspectors.
And the records have to land somewhere that is not a phone. Thirty inspections spread across three personal devices is not a survey of a neighborhood; it is three piles. Recordings stay with the company, private, reachable through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs, kept for 90 days, a year, or three years depending on the plan. The security page spells that out.
The rest of this series
Four posts follow this one, each on a piece of the storm week that deserves its own treatment: the first 72 hours after a hail storm, separating storm damage from ordinary wear, documenting a whole neighborhood in a week, and emergency repairs on the record.
They all come back to the same idea. You get one pass at the roof in the condition you found it. Make the record then, make it the same way every time, and let the homeowner watch you make it.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.