The call comes at nine at night and it is still raining. Water is coming through a bedroom ceiling, and the only useful thing anybody can do is get a tarp over the opening and go home. That is the right call. It is also the moment the roof stops being the roof the storm left and becomes a roof you changed in the dark.
Emergency roof repair documentation is the record of that change. What the roof looked like before you touched it, what you did to it, and what was underneath when the temporary work came off. Nobody who arrives later can see any of that. A tarp hides the thing it is protecting, and a patch that works is invisible. If it is not on the record, it did not happen.
Three moments, not one
Most crews treat an emergency call as one event: we tarped it. It is actually three, and each one is a different record.
Before. The condition you found. The only version of the roof without your hands in it, and it exists for about four minutes.
During. What you put on, where, and how it is fastened. Tarps are held down by something, and that something usually goes through the deck.
After. What is under the tarp when it comes off, days or weeks later, in daylight.
Skip one and the story has a hole. The first gets skipped most: worst conditions, most pressure, and it is the one you can never go back for.
The two minutes before you touch anything
Two minutes of video before you put a hand on anything is the cheapest thing you will do all week.
Start the recording at the truck and keep it running. Say the address, the date and the time out loud, and say what you were called out for. Shoot the elevation wide from the ground before anything else. Then get what you can safely get: the opening, the slope around it, which way the water is running, anything already lifted or missing nearby. Interior too if you are inside anyway, because the ceiling stain has a shape tonight that it will not have in a week.
If the roof is not safe to walk in the wet, and often it is not, say so on the recording and shoot from the ladder or the ground. "I could not get up there, here is why, here is what I can see from the eave" is a good record. A silent gap is not.
Record the tarp going on, not just the tarp
The temporary work is itself something you did to somebody's house, and it leaves marks. Battens screwed through good shingles. Fasteners through the deck. A board-up that dents a frame. All of it is legitimate emergency work, and all of it gets found later by somebody who was not there.
So keep the camera running while the work goes on, or at least shoot the sequence: where the tarp lands, how far up the slope it runs, where each batten goes, how the edges are sealed. Narrate the reasoning. "Running it over the ridge because the wind is out of the north, screwing into the deck here because there is nothing else to hold it." Two sentences at the time replace an argument later. Then shoot the finished condition wide from the ground, so there is a frame of how the house looked when you left it.
What emergency roof repair documentation has to carry
Four things, the same four the storm damage documentation pillar lays out in full.
When. Not "last week." A timestamp on the recording, said out loud as well, because the order of events is the whole subject here. Before the tarp, during, after.
The whole roof, not just the hole. Two minutes of the surrounding slopes costs nothing and answers a question you cannot anticipate yet.
The parts that are fine. If three slopes were sound when you tarped the fourth, that belongs on the record too.
Who was there. Name the people on site, and say whether the homeowner was home.
When the tarp comes off
The removal visit gets treated as a formality. It is the most useful record of the three: daylight, time, and conditions nobody has seen since the night of the call.
Do it in the same order as a normal walk. Wide shot of the elevation with the tarp on. Wide shot with it off. Then the detail: the opening, the deck around it, anything that got worse underneath, and the fastener holes you made, which need fixing and need to be on the record as yours. Match each after shot to the angle you took on the night, because matching angles are what make two recordings comparable at all. That discipline is in before and after photo pairs.
Say what changed and what did not. "Same lifted section as Tuesday night, no worse. This staining on the deck is new." You are not deciding anything. You are describing a sequence somebody can follow in six months without you.
Let the homeowner watch the call they cannot attend
Emergency calls happen at the worst hours, and the homeowner is usually inside with a bucket rather than out in the yard in the rain. That is a reason to have them watching, not a reason to skip it. With InspectStream the inspector texts a link and they tap it. It opens in the browser they already have. No app, no account, and their phone never asks for camera permission, because they are watching and not participating. They can be in the kitchen or three states away looking after a parent's house. The whole flow is on the how it works page. It matters most on removal day, when the homeowner sees what is under the tarp at the same moment you do, with you narrating.
The record has to outlive the phone it was shot on
The point of a timestamped video is that it is still findable later, when the tarp is a memory and the person who put it on works somewhere else.
Recording starts on its own, so nobody has to remember it at nine at night, and the files land with the company rather than on one inspector's phone. Recordings are private and reached through short-lived signed links, never public URLs. The viewing link expires after twelve hours, or when the inspector ends the session. How long recordings stay available runs from 90 days to three years by plan, and emergency work is exactly the job that gets asked about long after everyone stopped thinking about it. The security page has the specifics.
Emergency repairs are the hardest part of storm work to document and the easiest to justify skipping. Two minutes before, the sequence while you work, a proper walk when it comes off. It fits inside the visit you were making anyway.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.