Emergency roof leak: what to do in the first hour

It is the first proper front of the winter, the wind is coming off the north west at fifty, and water is coming through the ceiling. You have phoned four numbers. Two did not answer, one said next week, and one said they will come now for an amount that made you put the phone down.

Here is the honest position from a contractor. Getting onto a wet, wind-loaded roof in the dark is how people die, and any waterproofing applied to a soaking substrate in the rain will not bond and will not hold. Anybody offering to permanently fix your roof at nine on a Tuesday night in July is selling you something that will fail, at emergency rates.

What you can do tonight is limit the damage. That part is genuinely useful, and it is mostly free.

1. 1Electricity first. If water is anywhere near a light fitting, a downlight or a distribution board, switch that circuit off at the board. Water tracks along wiring. This is the only part of tonight that can actually hurt you.
2. 2Move what matters. Electronics, documents, instruments, anything upholstered. Then furniture. A bulging ceiling gives very little warning.
3. 3Contain, do not block. Buckets and towels under the drip, plastic sheeting over what you cannot move.
4. 4Relieve a bulging ceiling. If a section of ceiling board is sagging and heavy with water, put a bucket under it and pierce the lowest point of the bulge with a screwdriver so it drains in a controlled way. A whole ceiling coming down is a far bigger repair than one hole you made on purpose.
5. 5Look, from inside. Go into the roof space with a torch if it is safe to do so from the hatch, without walking out onto the ceiling boards. You are looking for where the water is running and where it enters. Photograph it. This is the single most valuable thing you can do, because it is evidence only available while it is raining.
6. 6Photograph and time-stamp everything, inside and out. If there is an insurance claim coming, this is the claim.
7. 7Check the gutters and downpipes from ground level. If a gutter is overflowing in a sheet down the wall, that may well be your whole problem, and clearing it tomorrow morning may be the fix.

There is a real service here, and it is honest work when described properly. It is temporary containment: securing sheeting over a defined area, clearing a blocked outlet or gutter so the water has somewhere to go, or fitting a temporary cover over a hole. It buys you the days until the weather clears.

The value of the wet night is the evidence. On the first dry day, that evidence turns into a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is what determines whether you are spending two thousand rand or forty thousand.

Take your photographs, the timing of when the leak appeared, and which way the wind was blowing, and give them to whoever comes to look. Wind direction alone often tells us which slope to look at, because a Cape north wester drives water in at details that a summer south easter never touches.

The leak you photographed while it was raining is worth more than three quotes obtained in dry weather.

We will tell you honestly whether it is safe and worth anybody coming out in that weather. If containment will help, we will price it as containment. If it will not, we will say so rather than take the call-out fee, and we will book the inspection for the first workable day.

The inspection is free, it includes going into the roof space as well as onto the roof, and you get a written diagnosis with photographs and the water path in a sentence. Then you can decide.

Phone or WhatsApp is fastest in winter. If it is after hours, WhatsApp and we will pick it up first thing.