An open roof soaks insulation, drywall, and framing with every storm — we tarp and secure it today, 24/7
When a storm tears open your roof, the damage clock starts immediately — and it doesn't stop when the rain does. Within the first rainfall after the opening, water penetrates directly into your attic insulation, saturating it and rendering it useless. Wet fiberglass or cellulose insulation pressed against your ceiling drywall begins transferring moisture within hours. Ceilings sag. Drywall swells. Paint bubbles. What started as a roof repair quickly becomes a multi-room water damage remediation project.
The timeline gets worse fast: within 24 to 48 hours of moisture entering a closed wall or attic cavity in Eau Claire's warm summer humidity, mold spores begin colonizing. Mold remediation adds thousands to your repair bill and can make portions of your home temporarily uninhabitable. Saturated ceiling drywall and weakened joists create genuine collapse hazards, especially in older Eau Claire homes with plaster ceilings. Electrical fixtures, junction boxes, and recessed lighting are all electrocution hazards once water reaches them.
There is also a critical insurance dimension: your homeowners policy requires you to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage after a covered loss. An adjuster who sees photos of an uncovered roof opening sitting in the rain for three days may argue that the resulting water damage — the ruined flooring, the saturated insulation, the mold — is attributable to your failure to mitigate, not to the original storm. Professional tarping protects your property AND your claim.
Don't wait until morning. Don't wait for the rain to stop. Call (800) 792-0212 right now — our Eau Claire emergency team is on call 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Eau Claire is a city of distinctive character — bisected by the Chippewa River and the Eau Claire River, with neighborhoods that range from the historic architecture of the South Side and the Randall Park area to the newer developments near the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire campus on the bluffs overlooking the valley. Established residential streets in areas like the Emmons Creek neighborhood, Birch Street, and the East Hill district are lined with mature oak, maple, and elm trees that are beautiful in calm weather and genuinely dangerous to roofs during the severe thunderstorms that roll through the Chippewa Valley every spring and summer.
Storm damage patterns in Eau Claire are shaped by the city's geography. The lowland areas near Phoenix Park and the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire Rivers tend to see flooding issues, while homes on the bluffs and elevated terrain in neighborhoods near UW-Eau Claire and the Rice Lake Road corridor experience the full force of northwest Wisconsin's notorious straight-line windstorms. Hail events that track through Dunn, Chippewa, and Eau Claire counties often produce golf ball-sized or larger stones that punch through aging shingles with devastating efficiency. We know these neighborhoods. We understand how storm tracks move through the Chippewa Valley, and we've repaired roofs in Eau Claire's residential communities during the aftermath of severe summer supercell storms, derecho wind events, and late-season squall lines.
Allied Emergency Services also serves the surrounding Eau Claire County communities including Altoona, Augusta, Elk Mound, and Fall Creek, as well as nearby Chippewa Falls in Chippewa County. Whether your property is a craftsman bungalow near the downtown Confluence area, a ranch home in the Otter Creek area, or a newer construction property in the developing areas along Hastings Way and Folsom Street, our licensed crews have the equipment and experience to respond quickly and protect your investment.
Every hour of delay is more water, more damage, more cost. Allied Emergency Services covers all roof opening scenarios — fast.
Eau Claire's severe thunderstorm season runs from late April through early October, with peak activity in June and July. Straight-line winds exceeding 60 mph are common in northwest Wisconsin supercell events and can strip entire sections of shingles, peel back underlayment, and uplift large portions of roof decking in seconds. Our crews are trained to safely access storm-damaged roofs, assess the structural integrity of the decking before standing on it, and install properly secured tarps that won't become projectiles in the next windstorm.
Hail damage to roofing is insidious — the visible bruising, granule displacement, and punctures are not always obvious to an untrained eye, but they compromise the waterproofing integrity of the entire roofing system. A hail impact that leaves a visible depression in an asphalt shingle has likely cracked the fiberglass mat beneath it, creating a point of future failure that will leak within months. When Eau Claire experiences a significant hail event, our crews document every impact zone with close-up photography before protecting damaged sections with temporary cover.
Eau Claire's residential neighborhoods are beautifully canopied with mature trees — and that same canopy becomes a source of significant roof damage when severe thunderstorms arrive. A fallen oak or elm can drive through multiple layers of roofing, snap rafters, and create openings that allow rain to flood an attic within minutes. Tree-strike damage requires a coordinated response: the tree or limb must be safely removed or stabilized before the roof can be safely accessed, and the structural damage to the decking and framing must be assessed before any tarp is installed over it. Our crews are trained to handle this sequencing safely and efficiently.
An emergency tarp is a life raft, not a permanent solution. Allied Emergency Services is uniquely positioned to take your Eau Claire property from emergency stabilization all the way through to completed permanent repair. Once the tarp is in place and your insurance claim process is underway, we coordinate with your adjuster, develop a comprehensive repair scope, and execute the permanent roofing work with our own licensed Wisconsin crews. This continuity eliminates the frustrating gap between emergency contractors and repair contractors — a gap where properties sometimes sit tarped for months while homeowners scramble to find a qualified roofer.
Northwest Wisconsin is no stranger to severe weather. The Chippewa Valley's geography — a broad river valley flanked by upland terrain — funnels and intensifies storm systems tracking from the southwest and northwest. Understanding the region's storm patterns helps homeowners prepare and respond faster.
Eau Claire's peak severe weather season runs from mid-June through August. Afternoon heating over the bluffs and upland terrain west of the city regularly fires convection that organizes into supercell thunderstorms capable of producing large hail, damaging straight-line winds, and occasional tornadoes. The city's position in the upper Chippewa Valley means storms arriving from the northwest often accelerate as they descend toward the river bottoms, with wind gusts at the surface exceeding radar-estimated values. Neighborhoods on the east side of the city — including areas near Putnam Park, North Clairemont Avenue, and the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire campus — tend to bear the brunt of northwest-tracking severe cells.
The upper Midwest, including northwest Wisconsin, sits in one of the nation's highest-frequency corridors for derecho wind events — long-lived, bow-shaped thunderstorm systems that produce swaths of straight-line wind damage hundreds of miles long. A single derecho passage can damage hundreds of roofs across Eau Claire County in under an hour, overwhelming local roofing contractor capacity and creating multi-week waits for repairs. When a derecho event affects Eau Claire, Allied Emergency Services mobilizes additional crews from across our Midwest service network to accelerate response times and reduce the queue for emergency tarping.
As winter gives way to spring in Eau Claire, colliding air masses produce some of the season's most intense convection. April and May storms in the Chippewa Valley frequently combine strong wind shear with abundant moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, creating conditions favorable for large hail and tornado-producing supercells. Spring storms are particularly damaging to roofs that have been stressed by winter ice dam formation — shingles that have lifted at the edges during freeze-thaw cycles are especially vulnerable to the first significant wind event of spring. Allied's spring surge response team prepares for the April–May transition with additional crew availability and material stockpiling.
Eau Claire averages over 50 inches of snowfall per year, and the freeze-thaw cycles of late winter — when daytime temperatures climb above freezing but nights remain well below it — create ideal conditions for ice dam formation along roof eaves. Ice dams occur when heat escaping through the roof deck melts snow in the upper portions of the roof, which then refreezes at the colder eaves. The resulting ice backup forces water under shingles and into the roof deck, causing interior water damage that can mimic the appearance of a roof opening. Allied's crews are trained to differentiate ice dam damage from storm damage and document it correctly for insurance purposes.
September and October in Eau Claire bring a second period of elevated roof damage risk, as fall windstorms accelerate through a rapidly changing jet stream pattern and early-season snowfalls load tree branches that still carry full leaf canopy. A wet, heavy snow on undefoliated trees in late September or October is one of the most reliable producers of large-limb failures and tree-strike roof damage in northwest Wisconsin. Allied maintains year-round emergency response capacity precisely because Eau Claire's roof damage season is not limited to summer months.
Every year, homeowners across Wisconsin are injured — some fatally — attempting to tarp their own roofs after storm damage. The instinct to act immediately and protect your home is understandable and admirable. But the moment after a severe storm is precisely the worst moment to be climbing a ladder onto a damaged roof, and here's why professional tarping is not just a convenience — it's a safety and financial imperative.
The Fall Risk Is Real and Severe. Storm-damaged roofing materials are exponentially more dangerous to walk on than intact roofing. Shingles that have lifted or been displaced leave exposed underlayment, which becomes nearly frictionless when wet. Decking that has been impacted by hail or penetrated by a falling branch may have hidden structural weakness that cannot be detected visually from a distance. Our crews use fall-arrest systems, roof brackets, and staged access techniques that simply aren't practical for a homeowner making a one-time emergency repair. In Eau Claire's active storm season, emergency rooms see a consistent pattern of post-storm ladder and roof falls — often occurring the evening of or night after a storm, in low light, with adrenaline masking fatigue.
Improper Anchoring Creates New Damage. A tarp that isn't properly secured does two things: it blows off in the next wind event, re-exposing your roof, and the flapping edges can peel additional shingles and cause abrasion damage across a much larger area than the original opening. Hardware-store sandbags on tarp corners are not sufficient for Eau Claire's storm winds. Proper professional tarping uses board-over techniques — wooden planks secured along tarp edges to distribute load and prevent flapping — combined with tarp ties or weight anchors that don't require nailing through undamaged portions of the roof. Getting this wrong can add thousands of dollars in secondary damage.
Moisture Trapping Accelerates Mold. An improperly installed tarp that doesn't seal at the edges or that pools water rather than shedding it can trap moisture against the roof deck, creating exactly the conditions mold needs to colonize. Professional tarping includes assessment of drainage patterns on the roof, positioning of tarp edges to channel water away from the structure, and verification that no moisture is being pooled or redirected into wall cavities.
Insurance Documentation Requires Professional Standards. Insurance adjusters are experienced at identifying whether emergency mitigation work was performed professionally or haphazardly. A professionally documented tarping job — with timestamped before-and-after photographs, a written service report, and proper materials — supports your claim and demonstrates that you fulfilled your mitigation duty. A visibly improvised DIY tarp may prompt questions about the scope of the original damage versus damage that occurred afterward. Professional tarping protects your claim's integrity.
The bottom line: call the professionals first. Allied Emergency Services at (800) 792-0212 — we will be on your Eau Claire property faster than you can safely set up a ladder, and we'll do the job right the first time.
We guide Eau Claire homeowners through every step — from the emergency call through the final permanent repair. Here's exactly what the process looks like.
The moment you call (800) 792-0212, our dispatch team captures your address, damage description, and contact information. A licensed crew is routed to your Eau Claire property with a target arrival of 60 minutes. On arrival, we perform a rapid exterior assessment to identify all opening locations and evaluate structural safety before accessing the roof. The tarp is installed to cover all identified openings with proper overlap and anchoring. Before leaving, we verify that the installation is secure and that no active water intrusion is occurring. You receive our direct contact number for any overnight concerns.
After stabilization, our team conducts a comprehensive damage documentation session while conditions allow safe access. This includes wide-angle photographs establishing overall damage context, close-up photographs of every impact zone, hail strike, lifted section, and structural compromise, measurements of all damaged areas, and written notes on pre-existing conditions versus storm-caused damage. This documentation is organized into a structured report that mirrors the format preferred by major insurance carriers — including State Farm, Allstate, American Family, and regional Wisconsin insurers. Thorough documentation at this stage is the single most important factor in a smooth insurance claim process.
Once your claim is filed with your insurer, Allied can coordinate timing with your adjuster's inspection visit to ensure that a knowledgeable Allied representative is on-site when the adjuster evaluates the damage. We can walk through the damage documentation with the adjuster, answer questions about the scope of work required, and ensure that all storm-related damage is identified during the inspection. It's important to understand our role: Allied Emergency Services is a licensed restoration contractor, not an insurance adjuster or public adjuster. We document damage and perform restoration repairs. We do not adjust, negotiate, or settle insurance claims on your behalf. Our goal is to ensure all legitimate damage is properly visible and documented so your adjuster can make an informed evaluation.
Once the insurance estimate is approved and the repair scope is agreed upon, Allied's licensed Wisconsin roofing crews execute the permanent repairs. Depending on the extent of damage, this may include partial shingle replacement over a limited area, full roof replacement with new underlayment, ice and water shield, and architectural shingles, decking replacement in areas with structural damage, ridge cap and flashing repair or replacement, and interior remediation for any water damage that reached ceilings or walls during the storm. We work with major roofing material manufacturers and can match existing materials when partial replacement is appropriate, or help you select upgraded materials when a full replacement offers the opportunity for improvement.
Before we consider any Eau Claire project complete, a project supervisor conducts a comprehensive final inspection of all completed work — both the roof exterior and any interior areas affected by water intrusion. We walk through the project with you in person, reviewing all work completed, confirming that the property is fully weathertight, and answering any questions about maintenance, warranty coverage, and storm preparedness for future events. Allied's workmanship warranty covers our installation for a defined period, and we provide documentation of all materials installed — including manufacturer product data sheets — for your permanent home records. Our relationship with Eau Claire homeowners doesn't end when the final shingle is nailed.
Reviews represent typical customer experiences. Individual results may vary.
"A severe thunderstorm rolled through our neighborhood near the University Avenue area around 11 PM and took a huge section of shingles off the back of our house. I called Allied in a panic and they had a crew at our door in under an hour — in the middle of the night. The team was professional, explained exactly what they were doing, and had the tarp secured before the next round of rain hit. Absolutely saved our upstairs bedrooms from flooding."
"A large oak limb came down on our roof during the August derecho. The damage looked catastrophic from the ground. Allied's crew showed up, stabilized the limb so it wasn't moving around more, assessed the structural damage beneath it, and got a tarp installed that actually held through two more storms while we waited for the insurance adjuster. The damage documentation they provided was incredibly thorough — our adjuster commented on how complete it was. Highly recommend."
"We had significant hail damage after a major storm hit the Chippewa Valley last summer. I honestly didn't know how bad the roof was until Allied came out and walked me through the documentation photos. They pointed out damage I never would have seen from the ground. The process from tarp to final repair was smooth — same company handled everything. No confusing handoffs between contractors. Our roof looks better than it did before the storm."
We target a one-hour response time for emergency tarping calls throughout the Eau Claire area. Our dispatch operates 24/7 — including nights, weekends, and holidays. Once you call (800) 792-0212, the nearest available crew is immediately dispatched to your property. During widespread severe weather events affecting multiple Eau Claire County properties simultaneously, we communicate honestly about estimated arrival times and triage by severity of active water intrusion.
A properly installed commercial-grade tarp on an Eau Claire home typically remains effective for 30 to 90 days. Wisconsin's variable weather — summer thunderstorms, fall windstorms, and winter freeze-thaw cycles — will stress even a well-installed tarp over time. We recommend initiating the permanent repair process within the first two to three weeks of tarping. Our crews use heavy-duty reinforced polyethylene tarps with sealed edges and board-over anchoring to maximize tarp lifespan without creating additional roof penetrations.
Most standard Wisconsin homeowners policies cover emergency mitigation costs — including professional roof tarping — when damage results from a covered peril such as hail, wind, or a falling tree. Wisconsin policy language typically requires policyholders to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. Allied documents all emergency work thoroughly with timestamped photos and written reports to support your claim. We are licensed restoration contractors — not adjusters or public adjusters. Contact your insurer promptly after any storm event and notify them of emergency tarping work performed.
No — DIY roof tarping after a storm is one of the most dangerous home repair activities you can attempt. Damaged roofing materials are slippery, structurally unpredictable, and potentially hazardous. Beyond the fall risk, improperly anchored tarps create secondary damage, and hardware-store tarps installed without professional sealing can trap moisture and accelerate mold growth. Professional tarping also protects the integrity of your insurance claim in ways that improvised DIY work cannot. Call Allied at (800) 792-0212 instead.
Emergency tarping in Eau Claire typically costs between $300 and $1,500 or more depending on damage area size, roof pitch, accessibility, and time of day. Because most homeowners insurance policies cover emergency mitigation, many Eau Claire homeowners pay little or nothing out of pocket beyond their deductible. Allied provides a written estimate before work begins — no hidden fees, no surprise charges. Call (800) 792-0212 for an immediate assessment.
Our team responds within 1 hour — don't let damage get worse.
Allied Emergency Services responds to emergency roof tarping calls throughout Eau Claire and the surrounding Chippewa Valley. Whether you're in a downtown historic district, a suburban development along the city's expanding edge, or a rural acreage in Eau Claire County, we can reach you.
Text ESTIMATE to (844) 907-2546 — AI-powered, responds in minutes.
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