08/24/2026
Last week, we asked our team:
“Have you ever had a year like this?”
Almost every employee at McGuff has spent decades working on Indiana roofs, and the answer was pretty unanimous: no.
Our repair department has never been busier.
And something else has stood out: a lot of the calls we’re getting aren’t even from existing McGuff customers.
We’re meeting building owners for the first time because a storm has peeled back or completely blown off a roof we’ve never worked on before.
We’ve seen major roof blow-offs, wind damage, extreme rainfall and flooding — sometimes seemingly one weather event after another.
So we decided to look at the science.
Turns out, there’s some pretty interesting data behind what our crews are seeing.
Indiana’s annual precipitation has increased about 15% since 1895.
Across the Midwest, the amount of precipitation falling during the heaviest 1% of rain events has increased 45% since 1958.
And just this month, the Indiana State Climate Office at Purdue reported that some areas east of Indianapolis received more than 600% of normal rainfall during the first half of August.
That’s important for buildings.
A roof isn’t just designed to keep water out. It’s an entire system engineered to manage water volume, drainage, wind pressure and uplift.
And extreme weather has a way of finding the weakest part of that system.
The science around long-term tornado and damaging-wind trends is more complicated, so we’re not going to pretend every windstorm has one simple explanation.
But we can tell you what we’re seeing from the roof:
Indiana’s buildings have taken one heck of a beating in 2026.
And after 122 years of roofing in Indiana, our guys have a pretty good frame of reference.
