Hurricane Damage Roof Repair in Jacksonville, FL | Matthew & Irma Experience

Service

Hurricane Matthew hit the Duval County coast in October 2016. Hurricane Irma's inland track pushed tropical storm and Category 1 winds across the metro in September 2017. We assessed and repaired commercial roof damage from both storms. This page describes what that work looks like and how we document it for insurance.

Hurricane Matthew made landfall north of Cape Canaveral on October 7, 2016, and tracked northeast along the Atlantic coastline, producing Category 1 to Category 2 conditions along the Duval County coast as the eye passed approximately 20 miles offshore. Jacksonville Beach, Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and the barrier island commercial corridor took the most direct exposure. Roof damage across the beaches communities included lifted TPO seams on buildings with undersized fastener patterns, blown-off copings on 1980s-era parapet walls with deteriorated attachment, and extensive flashing failures on buildings where salt-air corrosion had compromised metal components before the storm.

Hurricane Irma in September 2017 produced a different damage profile. The storm tracked inland through Central Florida, but its outer bands pushed sustained tropical storm-force winds and Category 1 gusts across Duval County for an extended period — long enough to stress commercial roofs that had survived without incident through Matthew. Damage from Irma in the Jacksonville metro was more distributed: lifted edges on mechanically attached TPO on Southside office buildings, drain overflow damage on roofs where debris accumulation had blocked drains before the storm, and new leak paths on aging modified bitumen and BUR roofs that had marginal watertightness going into the storm season.

We have first-hand repair experience from both storms. The assessment and documentation work we did post-Matthew and post-Irma is the basis for how we approach every hurricane damage engagement: independent condition documentation before any repair work begins, written scopes distinguishing storm-caused damage from pre-existing condition, and repair sequences that address the active leak path first and the full scope second.

Post-Storm Assessment: What We Document

The first step after any hurricane or named storm event is an emergency assessment, not repair. Emergency dry-in — mechanically fastened reinforced tarps or temporary membrane over active breach points — comes immediately after the assessment if there is active interior penetration. But the assessment must happen first and must be documented before emergency repairs alter the evidence.

Our post-storm assessment protocol produces a photo log keyed to the roof zone diagram, with every identified damage point photographed from multiple angles before any temporary repair is applied. Every photo is GPS-stamped and time-stamped. The written assessment distinguishes three categories: storm-caused damage (new damage with evidence of wind force, water intrusion, or physical impact that was not present in prior inspection records), storm-aggravated condition (pre-existing deterioration that the storm accelerated or exposed), and pre-existing condition (damage that preceded the storm event and is not storm-attributable). This three-part structure is what adjusters, public adjusters, and coverage attorneys use to separate insurable loss from maintenance exclusions.

For buildings that had a pre-storm inspection report on file with us — the single most effective thing a Jacksonville commercial building owner can do before hurricane season — the post-storm assessment is a direct comparison: documented pre-storm condition versus documented post-storm condition. The delta is the insurable loss.

Matthew 2016 and Irma 2017: What We Learned

Matthew taught us that Atlantic-facing buildings in Jacksonville Beach and Atlantic Beach with ASCE 7-22 Exposure Category D conditions and undersized fastener patterns fail in a specific and predictable way: the corner zones lift first, because corner zone wind-uplift pressures are roughly two to three times the field zone pressure. Buildings where the fastener pattern was not differentiated by zone — using a field-zone pattern throughout — lost membrane corners in 100-115 mph gust conditions that a correctly specified corner pattern would have held.

Irma taught us that duration matters as much as peak intensity. The sustained tropical storm and lower-end Category 1 conditions across the metro over 8-12 hours fatigued attachment points that would have survived a shorter peak gust. We found lifted seam edges on mechanically attached TPO installations that had passed inspection before the storm — the attachment was marginal, and the sustained load failed it progressively over the storm duration. We now use that as a benchmark for pre-storm inspection: not just 'does the membrane appear sound' but 'does the attachment '