Storm damage roof inspection in Torquay

Torquay was built as a resort partly because the bay gives real shelter from the prevailing south-westerly wind, and for most of the year that shelter holds. It does nothing for an easterly gale, which comes straight into the bay unbroken, and it is easterly storms rather than the more commonly forecast south-westerlies that tend to catch Torquay property owners off guard.

Built across seven limestone hills, almost every street in the town has a gradient, and many properties sit on terraced or retained plots where a roof that has been stable for years suddenly takes wind from a direction its detailing has never been tested against.

Torre Abbey, set back from the harbour on lower ground, is a useful marker for how much shelter changes across a short distance in this town: buildings around it see a noticeably calmer exposure than the hillside terraces above Babbacombe a mile or so along the coast road.

The grand Victorian and Edwardian villas and hotels in Italianate style carry elaborate roofscapes: multiple ridges, dormers, lead-lined parapet gutters and rendered elevations designed to be looked at from the street rather than from above. That complexity is exactly what makes storm damage on these buildings so easy to miss from the ground: a lifted section of lead flashing tucked behind a parapet, or a slipped slate on a rear valley, is simply not visible to anyone standing on the pavement.

The large stock of converted flats compounds the problem, since a single roof now serves several households, none of whom necessarily has a clear view of the whole thing or a shared plan for who checks it after a storm.

A flown pass over a Torquay hotel or villa roof shows the whole complex geometry at once, in a way no ground-level inspection realistically can. For a property that has been converted into flats, that single flight settles what a dozen separate residents cannot easily establish between them: which part of the roof failed, and when.

Salt still reaches the whole seafront in an easterly storm, so fixings weakened by ordinary exposure are already primed to fail the moment wind direction changes, and a dated record taken promptly after the event is what ties that failure to a specific storm rather than general wear nobody had previously flagged.

Babbacombe and Oddicombe, on the quieter northern side of the headland from the main harbour, take a noticeably different version of an easterly storm to the properties directly on Tor Bay, and Kents Cavern's position on high ground nearby is a useful marker for how much the terrain varies across a town covered by a single TQ1 to TQ2 postcode range. Newton Abbot, inland, is a considerably calmer booking.