Roof leaking during a monsoon storm: what to do right now

The first hour

1. Catch the water and protect the floor. Bucket under the drip, towels or plastic around it, move furniture and electronics.
2. If the ceiling is bulging, pierce it. A small hole with a screwdriver at the low point of the bulge lets the water out in a controlled stream instead of bringing the drywall down.
3. Photograph everything, with the date. The stain, the drip, the bulge, the floor. Insurance claims live or die on the first photos.
4. Note what the weather was doing. Sideways rain from the south, hail, a wind gust that moved the patio furniture. That is the difference between storm damage and age for the adjuster.
5. Call a roofer for a dry-in. Say the word "leak" and where the water is showing. Do not wait for the storm to pass to call; the queue is forming now.
6. Check the attic if you safely can. A flashlight from the hatch, not a walk across the joists. Where is the water on the deck? That tells the roofer where to start.

What not to do

• Do not get on a wet tile roof. Wet concrete tile is like soap. People die doing this every monsoon season.
• Do not let anyone throw a tarp over the ridge weighed with bricks. Bricks crack tile, and a tarp that is not fastened at the battens becomes a sail in the next gust.
• Do not sign anything on the driveway. No assignment of benefits, no "today only" contract, no contingency agreement. A dry-in is a small, separate job; the permanent repair is quoted after the roof is dry and inspected.
• Do not accept a permanent-repair quote given from a ladder in the rain. Nobody can diagnose a tile roof in a storm.

Why a roof that never leaked suddenly does

Tile sheds most of the water. The felt underlayment under it handles the rest, and after 15 to 25 years in Mojave heat that felt is brittle and split in places nobody has seen because it has not rained hard enough to matter. The monsoon changes the physics: rain driven sideways by 40-mile-an-hour gusts goes under the tile at the eaves and the ridge, volumes of water hit the valleys at once, debris dams form, and every split in the felt becomes an entry point in the same afternoon. That is why the first monsoon leak on a 1990s roof is so often leaks, plural, in rooms that have nothing to do with each other. More on how valley tile roofs age.

What emergency dry-in actually is

A proper dry-in is not a blue tarp. Where the problem area is small, the roofer lifts the tile over it, lays new underlayment over the split section, resets the tile and secures loose ridge or hip pieces. That holds until the permanent repair and often becomes part of it. Where the damage is too wide to dry in the same day, a tarp is fastened at the battens with wood strips, not weighed down, and covers from above the entry point to past the eave so water cannot get back under it. Either way, the roofer photographs the damage before touching it, so your insurer sees what the storm did and not what the repair did.

After the storm: diagnosis and insurance

Once the roof is dry, the real inspection happens: where exactly the water got in, whether it was a detail (a boot, a flashing, lifted ridge tile) or the underlayment across the field, and what the permanent fix is. You get that in writing with photos. If the cause is storm damage, wind-lifted tile, hail-cracked tile, debris impact, it is usually an insurance matter and the photos and scope are written the way adjusters need them. If the cause is 25-year-old felt that finally split, it is usually not covered, and a roofer who tells you otherwise is setting you up for a denied claim. See how we handle claims and monsoon response.