The adjuster is scheduled for Tuesday. The tarp has been on since the storm, you have sixty photos on your phone, and a man in a truck with out-of-county plates has knocked twice offering to "handle the whole claim." This site connects you by phone with an independent local roofing contractor who documents roof damage in south Brevard County. It is not a public adjuster, a law firm, or an insurer, and nothing here is legal advice.
The contractor's job in a claim is documentation. They walk the roof and photograph each slope, count lifted or missing shingles or loosened panels, mark where underlayment is torn, and note whether the plywood is wet. They separate what the storm did from what was already worn, which on a 17-year-old Palm Bay roof is the whole argument. Then they write a line-item scope: materials, quantities, labor, permit, and what has to come off to fix what is damaged.
On beachside roofs they note the corrosion that was there before the wind, because a carrier will. Many contractors will meet the adjuster on the roof so the two are looking at the same thing.
Photograph the damage inside and out before anything is moved. Get the roof tarped and keep the receipt; emergency protection is normally part of the claim, and your policy requires you to prevent further damage. Call your insurer and get a claim number.
Then find your policy's declarations page and read three lines: the hurricane deductible, which is usually 2 to 5 percent of dwelling coverage on a named storm; the notice-of-claim deadline; and whether the roof is covered at replacement cost or actual cash value. A roof over a certain age on an actual-cash-value schedule pays out less, and that is worth knowing before Tuesday.
Nobody on this site can tell you what your policy will pay. As a general pattern, sudden wind damage from a storm is the kind of loss a Florida homeowner policy is written for. Wear, age, granule loss from the sun, salt corrosion, and leaks that have been running for months are usually treated as maintenance and excluded. A roof that the carrier already asked about at renewal is going to be looked at closely.
Once the insurer issues its decision, the repair is a storm damage or replacement job with a permit pulled through the city or county. A disputed claim is a job for a licensed public adjuster or an attorney, not a roofer, and Florida runs a mediation program for exactly that.
Florida rewrote its property insurance law twice in 2022. Three changes matter for a roof claim. A new claim must be reported within one year of the date of loss, down from two, and a supplemental claim within 18 months. Assignment of benefits, where a contractor takes over your claim, is no longer allowed on residential policies issued on or after January 1, 2023, so the man in the truck cannot "handle the whole claim" on a current policy; the claim stays in your name. And since May 2022, a carrier cannot refuse to renew solely for roof age if the roof is under 15 years old or an inspection shows five or more years of life left.
The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation publishes the wind-mitigation form that carriers use to price the wind portion of a premium, and a new roof documented on that form is often the thing that changes a renewal quote. Many south Brevard homes that lost private coverage after Irma and the 2022 storms ended up with Citizens Property Insurance, the state-backed carrier, which has its own roof-age and inspection rules at renewal.
A roof inspection report from before the storm is the single most useful document in a claim, because it proves what the roof looked like the week before. The wind mitigation page covers the form that changes the premium after.
Have the address, the storm date, the claim number, the adjuster's visit date if scheduled, and your policy's declarations page. Say whether the roof is tarped and whether the home is occupied. Call (321) 490-1097.
Standing byDescribe the roof in plain words. The call is routed to an independent local roofing contractor who works shingle, metal, and tile roofs in your part of south Brevard County.
A lifted shingle, a rusted pipe boot, a valley that drips in every afternoon storm, or salt-eaten flashing on a beachside roof, found and fixed.
Tear-off to the deck, re-nailing, sealed underlayment, and a new shingle or metal roof permitted through the right city or county desk.
Tarping, photos, and repair after wind, a tornado band, or a named storm lifts shingles or peels panels off a Brevard roof.