Can a roof be cleaned after a hurricane?

The Florida Department of Financial Services, through its Office of the Insurance Consumer Advocate, gives storm-affected homeowners a short list of steps for an insurance claim.

• DFS's first step is to report damage to the insurance agent or company.
• Its second is documentation: “Take photos and/or video to document damage and share with the company adjuster.”
• Its third concerns damaged items: “If it's safe, keep damaged items so that the adjuster can inspect them.” DFS says anything unsafe to keep is photographed or filmed before it is discarded.
• DFS also asks homeowners to document the damage and repairs with receipts and photos or video.

Read against a roof, those steps put a cleaning, which changes how a roof surface looks, after the photographs DFS describes rather than before them. Whether pictures of a cleaned roof are useful to a carrier is a separate question, answered on insurance photos of a clean roof, and what a particular policy requires is the insurer's to say.

The second step belongs to the roofing trade, and the tile makers say so in their own documents.

Eagle Roofing Products and the Tile Roofing Industry Alliance both write that broken tiles may let water and UV rays reach the underlayment and damage it. Eagle's owner information, attached to its Florida limited warranty as archived, says that if inspection is desired or repair work is required, the owner should contact the original roofing contractor, or if unavailable, “another qualified licensed roofing contractor.” On a concrete or clay barrel tile roof, that routing is the whole answer for a broken tile. Whether a cleaned surface makes problems like that easier to see is answered on whether a clean roof makes damage easier to see, and whose job the broken tile is on whether fixing broken tiles is a roof cleaner's job.

The same archived warranty text excludes damage to the tile or structure caused by hurricanes and other acts of nature, and damage to the tile caused by roof traffic or other trades. Limbs and leaves left on a roof after a storm are a separate question, answered on whether roof cleaning removes leaves and debris.

With the damage recorded and the roof in a roofing contractor's hands where it needed to be, a cleaning is what is left: it removes growth and staining from the surface, and that is all it does.

It is not an inspection, a repair or a coating. Under Florida Statutes 489.105(3)(e), coating belongs to the roofing contractor's trade, “except when coating is not represented to protect, repair, waterproof, stop leaks, or extend the life of the roof.” The statute's word is coating, and a cleaning is neither a coating nor a way to do any of those five things. The line between the two trades is drawn in full at where a soft wash cleaning stops and a roofing contractor starts, and the same boundary for all three surfaces is on what an exterior cleaner is not.

What the cleaning works on is the surface: algae, mold and staining. Whatever the roofing contractor found or repaired stays that contractor's finding, and a clean surface afterward is not a second opinion on it. Marks a storm leaves on other outside surfaces are a different subject, taken up on whether exterior cleaning removes storm debris stains.

The National Hurricane Center states that the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30.

NHC puts the climatological peak at September 10, with most activity between mid-August and mid-October, and it notes that tropical cyclone activity sometimes occurs before and after the official dates. A storm can arrive early in the season or late, which is why the order above is written as an order and not as a date: report and document, then the roofing contractor, then the cleaning.

The Eagle and TRI Alliance documents cited here tie a roof cleaning to no point in the hurricane season and set no waiting period between a storm and a cleaning. The gap is set by the steps that come first.