Your roof and walls, making up your building envelope, take a beating dealt by mother nature on a daily basis. These structures are the front line to keeping those elements out of your building and away from everything that makes your business function day in and day out. Mother nature is not kind at times. We all cary insurance on various parts of our life to mitigate risk in the event disaster strikes and we are not financially prepared for the repercussions of that event.
We are often brought in by public insurance adjusters, policy holder legal representation, engineers and consultants to help assess commercial roof and facade conditions, observing suspected internal moisture content. Storms are known for causing openings in the exterior caused by wind and hail damage. What is not as easily visible from the outside is the extent of the damage on the inside from moisture getting in. We are involved in many cases where there may have only been a few found openings in the roof caused by wind, but the amount of moisture damage was extensive. Enough so to deem the roof a total loss due to the amount of internal damage.
For this particular case, we were brought in to perform a thermal roof inspection and moisture meter test on 2 neighboring roofs under the same ownership and insurance policy. Both claims were from hurricane Irma with suspected wind damage. The process we put this roof through included capturing visible images documenting the exterior, thermal images documenting where we suspected moisture, walking the roof looking for external damages and performing non-destructive moisture meter testing to further validate where we suspect moisture to be wet or dry. Our detailed report discussed all of our observations from an unbiased perspective. Each roof was roughly 25,000 sq’ in size. One building contained just under 12,000 sq’ of suspected moisture and the other had about 9,000 sq’ giving us about 48% and 36% suspected moisture content within each roof. After studying the direction of the winds from the storm, the differences in damage on the roof all added up and correlated with where we were observing interior damage.