Emergency Roof Repair in Ontario: The 4 Real Emergencies, and What They Cost

The difference is whether the roof still has a covering. A leak means water has found a fault in a roof that is otherwise intact, and the fault will still be there in the morning. An open roof means the covering is gone, the deck or the underlayment is bare, and every hour of rain goes straight into the house.

That distinction decides everything else, including the bill. A leak is a diagnosis job and diagnosis is slow, careful work that wants daylight and a dry deck. An open roof is a containment job, and containment is fast, crude and genuinely urgent.

Most people phone us with the first and describe it as the second, which is understandable at midnight with a bucket filling in the hallway. So the first thing we ask is not where the water is coming in. It is whether anything is missing from the roof, and whether the sky is visible from the attic.

If you are not sure, that is a fair answer at 11 p.m. and we would rather talk it through than have you up a ladder in the dark to find out.

Four situations are worth a night call: the roof covering is gone and rain is coming, water has reached something electrical, a ceiling is holding a bulge of water, or ice at the eave has taken the roof edge apart. Everything else on a roof waits for daylight and costs less for waiting.

The second row is the one to take literally. Ontario's Electrical Safety Authority warns that electricity moves through water and wet flooring, so if water is anywhere near a fixture or a panel the breaker goes off before a hand goes near it, and a licensed electrician clears it before the power goes back on.

Notice what is not on that list. A brown ring spreading slowly on a ceiling, a drip you can catch in a pot, a few tabs lifted on a windy afternoon with no rain forecast. All of those are real problems and none of them is improved by a crew arriving at 2 a.m. with a headlamp.

The fourth row is the Ontario one, and it is the one that catches homeowners out because it does not look like a roof problem at all. On Harvey Street in Orillia in March 2025 we found severe damage from an ice dam that had built up along the roofline until meltwater was seeping into the soffit and fascia. Nothing had blown off. The roof looked fine from the driveway.

Call now if water is still getting in and something is still getting worse. Wait if the water has stopped, or if you can contain it in a bin overnight. The premium is real but it is smaller than most people fear, and it is almost always smaller than another eight hours of water in a ceiling.

There is a wrinkle in that advice worth seeing drawn out, because it changes how the premium should feel. A scheduled rate is not most of the week. It is a narrow block in the middle of five days.

Three quarters of the week is already outside scheduled hours. A Saturday afternoon is out of hours. So is 7 p.m. on a Tuesday. If your roof opened at nine on a Friday night, waiting until Monday morning does not avoid the premium for very long and it does buy the water another sixty hours inside the house.

So the real question is not the clock. It is whether the damage is still progressing. Water that has stopped arriving costs nothing to leave until morning. Water still coming in through a bare deck compounds, and it compounds into insulation, drywall, and eventually the framing, none of which are roof repairs any more.

One honest exception runs the other way. If it is blowing hard enough to have taken your shingles off, it is usually blowing too hard for anybody to work safely on the slope. We will not put a crew on a roof in a live windstorm, and a contractor who promises to is telling you something about how they treat their people. The same applies to you and a ladder: CCOHS sets out how a portable ladder has to be footed and angled, and none of it is achievable on wet grass in the dark. In that case the work is containment from inside until the wind drops.

An Ontario emergency call-out adds roughly $150 to $300 on top of whatever the repair itself costs, and after-hours labour runs about 25 to 40 percent above the scheduled rate. An emergency tarp over a damaged section is $300 to $800. The permanent repair afterwards is priced as ordinary work.

Those are market bands rather than our price list, published here so you can tell a fair quote from an opportunistic one while you are standing in a wet hallway at midnight.

Two things are worth understanding about that structure. The call-out is not a penalty, it is the cost of a truck, two people and a stocked trailer leaving at an hour when they were not scheduled to. And the tarp is a separate job from the repair, which surprises people who expect one bill. You are buying time, not a fix.

What we will not do is quote a permanent repair in the dark. If somebody arrives at midnight with a price for a whole roof, that is a sales call wearing an emergency jacket. Tarp it, sleep, and get a proper quote in daylight.

A tarp fails for one reason: the wind got underneath it. Everything about doing it properly is about denying the wind an edge to lift.

The hardware store version is a tarp thrown over the damage with bricks or lumber laid on top. It survives the calm after the storm and leaves on the next gust, usually taking a few more shingles with it. Weight does not hold a tarp down. Fastening does.

Done properly, the tarp runs from above the damage right over the ridge or well up under a course of sound shingles, so water cannot track in at the top edge. The edges are rolled around lengths of wood and screwed flat to the roof, which spreads the load and keeps the fabric from tearing at the fixings. It is pulled tight, because a loose tarp is a sail and a drumming tarp saws through itself in a night.

• Cover well past the damage on all four sides, never just the hole.
• Take the top edge over the ridge or under sound shingles, so water runs onto the tarp and not under it.
• Wrap and screw the edges down over battens rather than weighting them.
• Expect to fill the screw holes at the permanent repair. That is a known cost and a fair trade.

A properly fastened tarp will hold for weeks, which matters in Ontario because the permanent repair often waits for a dry stretch or for an adjuster. A weighted one is a single night of luck. Our roof repair and emergency crews carry battens on the truck for exactly this reason.

Home insurance in Canada covers sudden and accidental damage and excludes gradual deterioration. A windstorm stripping shingles is the first. Water that has been working through a worn roof for three winters is the second, and that is the line an adjuster is looking for when they get on your roof.

The part homeowners miss is that your policy also puts an obligation on you. You are required to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage once a loss has happened, which in roofing terms means containing the water and covering the opening. That duty is why an emergency tarp is usually paid for even where the underlying roof is not, and why the receipt matters.

So the sequence that protects you is fairly mechanical:

1. Photograph everything before anybody touches it, from the ground and from inside.
2. Contain the water and cover the opening. Do not wait for permission to stop the damage getting worse.
3. Call your insurer or broker the same day, even if you are not sure you will claim.
4. Keep every receipt, including the tarp, the fans and the hotel if the house is not habitable.
5. Do not have the permanent repair done before the adjuster has seen it, unless they tell you to go ahead.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada's guidance on filing a home insurance claim is worth reading before you ever need it. Two details catch people out. You will be asked to complete a sworn proof of loss form, usually within 30 days, and you are expected to keep the damaged material rather than clearing it away, unless it has become a hazard.

Step one is the one people skip and regret. A tarp goes on, the crew clears the debris, and two days later there is no photographic record of what the roof looked like at the moment of the loss. Ten minutes with a phone from the driveway is worth more than any argument you can make later.

Most emergency roofing content is written for a different climate. It is about hail, because in Alberta and much of the United States hail is the thing that empties a roofing truck. Here it is not.

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, which was set up by the Canadian insurance industry to study exactly this, puts the threshold at roughly 40 to 45 mm of hailstone before asphalt shingles begin to suffer, and higher again on a roof that is not already aged. That is a golf ball. Ontario gets plenty of pea and marble sized hail that sounds alarming on a skylight and does nothing at all to a shingle. ICLR also estimates hail has caused $9.5 billion in insurable damage across Canada since 2008, and very little of that total is Ontario roofing.

What actually opens roofs here is wind, falling limbs, and above all ice. Look at our own call record and the pattern is unmistakable. On Lake Drive in Jackson's Point in March 2025, an ice dam had pulled the eavestrough to the ground and taken the roof edge with it. On River Street in Sutton the same month, ice had backed water up until it went through the soffit. Both of those begin as a ventilation problem behind the soffit and fascia rather than as a roof fault. The Ontario roofing emergency has a season, and the season is late winter.

That is also why the best emergency call is the one that never happens. Ice dams are made in the attic rather than on the roof, and our guide to preventing ice damming before winter sets out the work that stops the March phone call. If the storm has already taken the trough with it, the six faults behind an eavestrough repair covers what comes next at the roof edge.

The tarp buys a week or three. What follows depends on how much of the roof is involved and how old it was on the night.

A single stripped patch on a roof with life left in it is a repair, and a straightforward one: cut back to sound material, re-lay the underlayment, tie new shingles into the existing courses, and re-flash anything the wind got behind. Our guide to choosing asphalt shingles for Ontario explains why matching the existing product matters more than matching the colour.

Wind that has taken shingles off in more than one place is a different conversation. It usually means the sealant strips have let go across the whole slope, and a roof whose tabs are no longer bonded will keep shedding them every time it blows. At that point the honest recommendation is a replacement rather than a fifth patch, and our breakdown of what a new roof costs in Ontario gives you the range before anybody quotes you.

The thing nobody expects is the flashing. Wind rarely lifts a field of shingles first. It finds an edge, usually at a rake, a valley or a penetration where the metal was short or loose, and works from there. When we repair storm damage we look at the flashing around every penetration before we look at the shingles, because that is generally where the failure started.

At Sherak we answer the phone at any hour, and we are straight about what that gets you. Overnight, it gets you a conversation, a triage and, if it is one of the four, a crew and a tarp. It does not get you a re-roof by breakfast and anybody promising one is selling.

What we will tell you on the phone:

• Whether what you are describing is actually an emergency, including when it is not.
• What we would do tonight, and what it will cost before we leave the shop.
• What is safe for you to do in the meantime, and what is not worth the ladder.
• When we can be there, honestly, including if there are three calls ahead of you after a storm.

We are based in Gormley and our crews work across York Region, Simcoe, the Kawarthas and the GTA, including the lakeshore towns where ice does most of this damage: Georgina, Whitchurch-Stouffville and Collingwood among them. Every job carries our 10 year workmanship warranty, $5 million liability insurance, and terms where the last 10 percent is due only once you are satisfied. More on leaks, storms and repairs in our roof repair guides.

Sherak Ltd, Head Office

12275 Woodbine Avenue, Gormley, ON L0H 1G0

Phone: +1 905 490 8800

Email: info@sherak.ca