Storm damage roof inspection in Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis sits on extremely steep ground at the Devon and Dorset border, built into a coast that is actively slipping rather than simply eroding slowly. That is unusual among the towns covered here: most storm damage elsewhere is purely weather-driven, but in Lyme Regis a heavy storm can trigger or accelerate ground movement that shows up on a roof as a distorted ridge line or a valley that has pulled away from true, on top of anything the wind itself did.

Separating a storm-damage claim from a pre-existing ground movement issue matters for how the claim is assessed, and a dated flown record taken close to the event is one of the few ways to show what the roofline looked like immediately after a specific storm rather than as a slow drift nobody can pin to a date.

The cottages and Georgian townhouses of the old town sit on streets steep enough that a scaffold or tower is a genuine logistical problem even without storm damage complicating access. Slate hanging on the exposed elevations, common here specifically because of driving rain off the sea, is one of the first things to show wind damage: a hung slate that lifts leaves a gap that is very hard to spot from street level on a near-vertical hillside.

Higher up at Uplyme and along the Charmouth road, more conventional Victorian villa and modern housing stock sees straightforward ridge and flashing failures in line with the rest of this exposed stretch of coast, without the added complication of ground movement.

Getting equipment up Lyme Regis's steepest streets after a storm, when surfaces are wet and footing is uncertain, is not a job worth doing just to establish whether there is anything to claim for. A flight avoids the access problem entirely and gets every elevation, including the ones facing directly onto the landslip coast that nobody safely walks along to inspect.

The resulting imagery gives a museum-quality historic building, a modern house at Uplyme, or anything between them the same dated, referenced record, which matters when the Cobb harbour and the fossil-bearing cliffs either side mean insurers here are used to seeing ground-movement disputes and want the storm evidence to stand clearly apart from them.

Lyme Regis Museum, close to the harbour, sits on ground stable enough that the landslip movement affecting parts of the town further along the coast is not a live concern for every property in the DT7 postcode area, though a roof there still takes the same open south-westerly exposure as anywhere else in the town. Seaton and Axminster, both a short drive north-east, are covered in the same visit where a claim spans more than one address.