There are a few reasons that could have caused your garage door to come off its tracks. The first important thing to know is that this is a very dangerous situation. You or your family members could be seriously injured so it is necessary to have this fixed as quickly as possible. Garage doors can be extremely heavy. Larger, heavier doors can weight up to 350 pounds. This can cause severe injury if it falls on someone.

So, what can cause this to happen?

• It was hit by a car
The garage door being hit by a car is the number one cause of the door coming off the tracks. Maybe you were in a rush, forgot to open the door before backing out or backed up before the door was fully open. When the door is hit, the bottom panels are usually damaged, but the entire door system can be affected. A car doesn’t need to be moving very fast to do big damage. It can force a couple of rollers off the tracks and then the door is dangerously hanging by its cables.

• Broken cables
The cables are located on either side of the garage door. If one side breaks, the weight is distributed to the other side, but it is not designed to handle all the weight. What normally happens is one side of the garage door will be closed and the other side will be partly open. With the door unbalanced like this it is easy for rollers to come off the tracks and throw the entire door off.

• Broken rollers
If your garage door rollers are not good quality or they have simply worn out from regular wear and tear, they can break. This causes additional stress on the remaining working rollers which in turn can cause them to break or come off the tracks. Extra weight on the remaining rollers can also cause the tracks to bend. We will discuss bending of the tracks in the next point.

• Tracks are bent or misaligned
Lower quality tracks can be a huge problem as they may not be able to support the weight of the door, causing them to bend and warp out of shape. Also, even with good quality tracks over time the bolts and brackets can loosen from the vibrations of the door’s operation. When this happens, the horizontal tracks can become misaligned from the vertical tracks making the rollers a much higher risk for coming off.

If any of the above has taken place, you should have your door repaired right away to prevent it from coming right off the tracks. ONC Doors can do the necessary repairs to ensure that your garage door is safe and working optimally again.