Water is coming in. Here is what to do. Call (631) 546-6565, we answer 24 hours a day, every day. While you wait for us, put something down to catch the water and move anything valuable out from underneath it. If a light fixture or outlet is anywhere near the wet area, shut off power to that room at the breaker before you do anything else.
What to do in the next ten minutes
- Move furniture and electronics out from under the leak. Anything that cannot get wet, move it now, before you do anything else.
- Put a container down. A bucket, a bin, a stack of towels, whatever catches the water and keeps it off the floor.
- If the ceiling is bulging with trapped water, relieve it. A small hole at the lowest point of the bulge, made with a screwdriver or the corner of a tool, drains the water into a bucket in a controlled way. Left alone, that same weight of water usually comes down on its own, and it takes a section of ceiling with it.
- Kill the power to that room at the breaker if water is anywhere near a light fixture or an outlet. Water and electricity in the same ceiling is the actual danger tonight, more than the leak itself.
- Photograph everything. The ceiling, the stain, the bucket catching water, the water itself. Insurance claims move faster and go further with photos taken while the damage is active, not after it is cleaned up.
Do not go up on the roof
Not tonight, not in the rain, not on a roof that just took storm damage. A wet roof or a roof with damage you cannot see from the ground is not a safe place to be standing, and a fall does more damage to your household than a leak ever will. That is our job, and we have the harness, the footing and the daylight to do it correctly. Wait for us.
What we do when we get there
We find the water's actual path first, not just the spot where it is dripping into your living room. Water travels along the underside of the deck and along framing before it shows up somewhere visible, so the entry point on the roof is rarely straight above the stain on your ceiling. Once we find it, we stop it.
Then we tarp the exposed area properly. That means the tarp is battened down along its edges and secured to the roof itself, not weighted down with bricks or cinder blocks, which shift, tear the tarp, and leave gaps for wind-driven rain to get back underneath. A tarp that is actually secured will hold through the next storm, not just the next calm night.
We will also be honest with you about what this visit is. An emergency call is stabilization. It stops the water and makes the house safe. It is not the repair. The permanent fix happens in daylight, once we can see the full extent of the damage, and it comes with a written scope before any work starts, the same way every job of ours does. If the damage turns out to be one section, that is a roof repair. If it is more extensive, we will tell you that too, and walk you through what a roof replacement actually involves.
What counts as an emergency, and what can wait until Monday
Not every roof problem needs a call at 11pm. Here is the honest split.
| Call now |
Call during business hours |
| Active water entering the living space |
A small stain that appeared once and stopped |
| A tree or large limb on the roof |
A couple of shingles in the yard with no interior leak |
| A section of roof lifted or gone after a windstorm |
A clogged gutter |
| Exposed decking, visible from inside or outside |
|
If what you are looking at is on the right side of that table, calling Monday will not cost you anything. Those are real issues worth a visit, they are just not ones where an hour either way changes the outcome. If you are not sure which column you are in, call anyway. We would rather tell you it can wait than have you guess wrong on a roof.
Nor'easters and coastal wind
Long Island's emergency calls cluster in a predictable pattern, right after a nor'easter comes through. It is not the wind speed alone that does the damage, it is sustained wind held against a roof for hours rather than one hard gust. That sustained pressure works hardest at the perimeter, the ridge, and any edge where a shingle's seal is already weak, which is why storms produce lifted sections and missing shingles at the eaves and ridge more than in the middle of a slope. If your roof took storm damage and you are also thinking about insurance, our storm damage roof repair page covers the documentation side of that process.
The scope goes in writing before the ladder goes up
That is true for a planned roof replacement and it is true here too, just compressed. Tonight's visit is priced and explained to you before we start the tarp. The permanent repair gets its own written scope once we can see the full damage in daylight. Nothing gets billed as a surprise.
We serve this emergency response across Long Island, including Port Jefferson, Mount Sinai, St. James, West Hampton, Manorville, Bayport and Wading River.
Emergency questions homeowners actually ask
Do you really answer at night?
Yes. We are available 24/7 for emergencies, and that means a person picks up the phone at 2am the same as at 2pm.
What does an emergency call cost?
We will not put a number on a web page for a job we have not seen. What we will do is scope the tarp and stabilization work and tell you the price before we do it, the same as every visit we run.
Will you tarp a roof you did not install?
Yes. An active leak does not wait for the roof's history, and neither do we. We assess what is actually there and stabilize it regardless of who put the roof on originally.
Does an emergency tarp affect my insurance claim?
Photographing the damage before we tarp helps your claim, and preventing further damage to your home is generally expected of a homeowner under most policies. We are not your insurance carrier, so for exactly what your policy requires, call them directly and ask.