What damages Houston roofs
The defining hazard here is the tropical system. Hurricanes and tropical storms moving inland from the Gulf subject a roof to many hours of continuous wind loading, often with the wind backing around through 180 degrees as the centre passes. A roof that survives the first half of a storm can fail in the second when the load arrives from the opposite direction and catches an edge that was previously sheltered.
Wind-driven rain is the second Houston-specific problem. Rain moving horizontally penetrates ridge vents, soffit vents, flashing laps and shingle courses that shed vertical rain perfectly well. Houston homeowners regularly report interior water with no visible roof damage at all — the covering is intact, but it was never designed to resist rain arriving sideways at 60mph.
Harris County's flat terrain and heavy clay soils compound it. There is nowhere for water to go quickly, so a roof breach during a flooding event often means water rising from below at the same time it is coming through above.
Working across Harris County
Houston is geographically enormous and the damage from a single system is rarely uniform across it. A storm tracking up the Houston Ship Channel does different damage in Pasadena and Baytown than the same system does out in Katy or Cypress. We cover the metro broadly — inside the Loop, the Energy Corridor, Clear Lake, Spring, Humble, Kingwood, Sugar Land and the Woodlands corridor — and prioritise by severity rather than by postcode.
Housing stock matters here too. Large parts of the metro are 1960s-1980s asphalt shingle on relatively low-pitch roofs, which strip readily in sustained wind. Newer master-planned communities to the north and west carry more architectural shingle and some standing-seam metal, which fails less often but is harder to tarp without creating new penetrations.
What we cover in Houston
The full range of tarping work, specified for Harris County conditions: emergency tarping when the roof is open and rain is coming, long-term tarping when the repair is months away, and commercial tarping for flat and low-slope buildings. Dispatch is answered 24 hours a day.