Storm and emergency roof repairs for Inner West homes

If water is coming in right now

Call (02) 8000 1103 and say where the water is appearing, how fast, and whether it is near any electrical fitting. That is the triage information.

Before anyone arrives: kill the power to that area at the switchboard if water is near a light or a fan. Get furniture clear. If a plasterboard ceiling is sagging and holding water, pierce it at the lowest point with something sharp and catch it in a bucket — a controlled release is far better than a collapsing sheet.

Why Inner West storms do this

Storms here are not usually long. They are short, dense cells that drop a large volume in a few minutes, and they land on the most continuously built roofscape in Sydney.

Three things combine:

Capacity. Box gutters are designed for exactly this kind of burst — the 1% AEP five-minute intensity — and the margin built in is 30 mm of freeboard. A gutter already holding leaf litter has already spent that margin before the rain starts.

Nowhere for it to go. The lanes are narrow, the setbacks are nil, and a lot of the ground is paved. Runoff backs up rather than draining away, and that includes runoff still sitting in a sump.

One outlet. Most of these roofs drain through a single downpipe with no independent overflow to atmosphere. When it chokes, the water has only one remaining route, and that route is your ceiling.

The result is that Inner West storm damage is more often water ingress from a drainage failure than a tile physically removed by wind — though on the detached, more exposed roofs out through Strathfield and Concord, lifted ridge capping and broken tiles are common too.

What make-safe means on an attached roof

On a freestanding house with a pitched tile roof, a tarp over the ridge is a legitimate temporary fix. On a terrace with parapets and no ridge, there is nothing to throw it over and nothing to tie it to.

So the method depends on the roof:

• Clearing the blockage. Very often the fastest effective action is getting the box gutter sump and downpipe flowing again.
• Temporary diversion. Guiding water to a point where it can leave the building instead of entering it.
• Sheeting and strapping. Covering a failed section or a gap at a parapet, weighted and fixed rather than relying on friction.
• Securing loose material. Lifted sheet, slipped slate or a dislodged capping that is going to end up on the footpath below.
• Protecting what is below. Letting a trapped ceiling drain in a controlled way instead of letting it come down.

Make-safe is not the repair. It is what gets your house dry so the repair can be assessed and quoted properly.

The faults a storm finds first

A storm does not create most of these. It exposes them.

• Box gutter sumps already part-blocked with leaf litter and roof grit
• Box gutters with no overflow device
• Parapet cappings cracked, with a long-dead damp-proof course beneath
• Party-wall flashings held together with hardened silicone
• Slate on corroded iron nails, which lets go slope by slope in wind
• Rusted valley irons under years of wet debris
• Eaves gutters hung with no fall, already carrying standing water
• Chimney flashings lifted away from porous stack brickwork

Which is why we always follow up with the question nobody wants: what was already failing before Friday night.

Insurance claims: what we do and do not promise

What we provide:

• Dated photographs of the damage and of the make-safe work
• A written description of the failure mechanism — what failed, and why
• An itemised quote for the permanent repair, with access and scaffolding shown separately
• A clear statement of what is storm damage and what is pre-existing wear, because an assessor will make that distinction anyway

What we will not do is tell you a claim will be approved, imply a particular outcome, or write a report that frames worn-out components as storm damage. That helps nobody and tends to sink claims rather than support them. A roof inspection report can be prepared separately if your insurer asks for one.

After the make-safe

Once the roof is dry, the permanent work is scoped. Depending on what failed, that might be a targeted repair, a box gutter reline or rebuild, or — if the storm was the last straw on a roof already at the end of its life — a full replacement.

Secondary damage gets checked too: wet insulation, soaked ceiling linings, softened rafter ends and wall plates. Water that has been in a roof cavity for a day does not simply dry out and disappear.

Call for storm response

Work is carried out by established, licensed and insured roofing contractors working to NSW Fair Trading requirements. Completed repairs carry a written workmanship warranty, and the inspection and written quote are free.

Call (02) 8000 1103 or send the details. Response covers all 29 suburbs on the service areas list, from Balmain and Leichhardt down to St Peters and Sydenham.