Storm damage roof inspection in Exmouth

Exmouth sits where the Exe opens into the sea, and there is nothing between the seafront and the Channel to slow a south-westerly gale before it reaches the first row of houses. In a storm that wind arrives already carrying salt, and it keeps arriving for as long as the front takes to clear, which is usually hours rather than minutes.

Properties along the front and up the hillside towards Orcombe Point and Sandy Bay take the worst of it, but a strong blow reaches well back into the town too, over Withycombe Raleigh and Littleham, because there is very little rising ground to break the wind's path once it clears the rooftops. A single street can come out of a storm with several separate problems rather than one.

On the Regency and Victorian villas up the hillside, storm damage concentrates on ridge bedding and verges first, because wind uplift is highest exactly there, and a mortar joint that has held for years can fail in one gust. Chimney flashings on the same buildings tend to lift at the same time, for the same reason.

The seafront apartment blocks are a different problem. Flat roofs and rendered parapets take the wind side on, and a parapet gutter that silts up in ordinary weather can overflow inward during a storm surge without anything visible happening on the outside of the building at all. Concrete tile further back at Littleham fails the same way at ridge and verge, just with mechanical fixings rather than mortar.

A storm that strips salt-worked fixings on one visit can strip more on the next, and Exmouth usually gets more than one storm a winter. Photographing the damage in the days after the event, before the next front, keeps the record tied to a single date rather than an accumulation nobody can separate out afterwards.

Seafront blocks with hidden parapet gutters are a particular case: the overflow that damaged a top-floor flat may have started at a gutter nobody in the building can see from any window, and a flown pass over the roof is often the only way anyone establishes where the water actually came from before a loss adjuster asks. None of it needs a ladder against a salt-slick wall in the aftermath of a gale.

Exmouth Marina, on the more sheltered west side of the town, brings modern flat and low-pitch roofing into the same EX8 postcode area as the exposed hillside villas above it, and a flight covering an address near the docks can just as easily take in a neighbouring property towards Sandy Bay in the same visit. Topsham and the rest of the Exe estuary sit close enough that a claim covering more than one address after the same storm rarely means a second trip out.