Homeowners await repairs to Ike-damaged roofs

By MIKE PRAMIK

Many owners of property in need of repair have had to wait weeks for temporary preventive measures.

Rooftops all over central Ohio are turning blue this fall, a colorful reminder of the damage that the remnants of Hurricane Ike wrought this past summer.

Roof-repair companies say they simply can’t keep up with thousands of damage claims resulting from the Sept. 14 windstorm, which blew across the state. In many cases, they’re laying down tarps, many of them are blue, to temporarily secure the roofs, leaving homeowners hoping the reinforced plastic shields can hold throughout winter.

Able Roofing, for example, has installed about 3,000 tarps on central Ohio homes. It can’t make repairs fast enough to keep up with the more than 400 weekly inspection appointments it has conducted since the storm.

“All of those tarps will be jobs, and there are many more to be done,” said Ross Appeldorn, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “I don’t know how many jobs we’ve booked. We’ve had three or four major hailstorms in the past five years in Columbus, but this level of damage is completely unprecedented.”

Feazel Roofing has been swamped with more than 2,000 storm damage claims, said Mike Feazel, company president. He said roof-replacement work is “backing up well into January, and before long it’s going to be February.”

“We’re bringing on more people, but you can only do it so quick or your quality suffers,” he said.

Overall, repair work could take well into spring, with local roofing companies handling the bulk of the work. Peter McMurtrie, chief claims officer for Grange Insurance, said he’s seen little evidence in Ohio of “storm chasers,” or companies that try to pick up work in areas with heavy damage.

McMurtrie said he thinks many of those companies headed to Texas and Louisiana, where Ike wreaked even more havoc, and to Arkansas because of Hurricane Gustav, which hit there Sept. 3.

Many owners of property in need of repair have had to wait weeks even for temporary preventive measures to protect their roofs.

Blue tarps finally were installed on several rooftops a week ago at the Village of Clermont, a condominium complex in Powell that sustained heavy damage.

Rob Shinafelt, the condo association’s president, said the storm damage was readily apparent on many of the 18 buildings at the nine-year-old complex.

“Shingles came flying off, and we even had a couple chimney caps knocked loose,” Shinafelt said. “One was blown to the ground. It was huge. It was probably 200 pounds. It’s a good thing nobody was underneath it.”