Storm damage roof inspection in Okehampton

Okehampton sits at the northern foot of Dartmoor where the East and West Okement meet, with the high moor and Yes Tor rising immediately to the south. Rather than simply being exposed to Atlantic weather the way a coastal town is, Okehampton sees that weather made worse by the moor forcing the air upward right on the town's doorstep, which increases rainfall and produces frequent driving rain even outside a formally named storm.

That orographic effect, air rising and cooling rapidly as it meets high ground, is a different mechanism to the wind-funnel effect seen in a valley town like Tavistock or Sidmouth, and it means Okehampton's roofs are under sustained wet-weather load for more of the year than most other towns covered on this site, storm season or not.

The granite and slate town centre, with Victorian terraces behind it, carries natural slate on granite-bedded ridges, a construction detail similar to Tavistock's stone bedding but reflecting the town's own quarrying history, and storm damage shows in disturbed bedding that can be easy to miss without a close aerial look. A large stock of post-war housing runs more conventional concrete tile.

Scattered moorland farms and longhouses in the surrounding parishes bring a different building type into the picture: corrugated metal on farm buildings, which fails very differently to a domestic tiled or slated roof, with sheets lifting or fixings pulling through rather than individual tiles slipping, and a storm claim on a working farm building needs recording on those terms.

Because roofs here stay wet for longer after a storm than almost anywhere else covered, and because driving rain is frequent rather than occasional, establishing that a specific piece of damage relates to one named storm rather than to the town's generally wet character is worth doing properly, with imagery dated as close to the event as the weather allows a flight to go up.

For the farm buildings specifically, a flown survey of a large corrugated roof gets an overview no ground inspection could realistically manage, plus close detail on exactly which sheets and fixings have failed, which matters for both the insurance claim and for pricing the repair afterwards.

Meldon Viaduct, on the edge of the high moor south-west of the town, marks roughly how far the orographic effect described above reaches before the ground drops away again, and the EX20 postcode covers both the granite town centre and the scattered farms further out on the moor edge where the corrugated farm roofs sit. Tavistock, along the same moor edge, takes a related but slightly less extreme version of the same weather.