Roof leaking after a storm: what to do in the first hour

The first hour, in order

1. 1
   Make it safePeople away from the water and away from anything sagging. No touching electrical fittings near the leak. Isolate power to the affected area only if you can reach the switchboard safely and dry.
2. 2
   Contain itBuckets, towels, a tarp or drop sheet over furniture. Move what you can. If a ceiling section is visibly bulging, keep everyone out from under it entirely.
3. 3
   Photograph everything before you clean upWide shots and close shots. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, the affected contents, the water level if there is one. Timestamped photos on a phone are exactly what you will want later and cost you nothing now.
4. 4
   Look outside from the groundIs a gutter visibly overflowing? Is a downpipe disconnected or blocked? Is there a downpipe you cannot see any water coming out of, when the others are running hard? That last one is the useful observation and it takes ten seconds.
5. 5
   Call the right numberSES on 132 500 for structural roof damage, a tree on the house or emergency tarping. Us for the plumbing side. An electrician first if power and water have met.
6. 6
   Do not throw anything out yetDamaged carpet, underlay, plasterboard and contents are evidence for a claim. Photograph, bag and set aside rather than binning, at least until you have spoken to your insurer.

Why the leak is never where the stain is

Water does not fall straight down through a roof. It runs. It will travel along the underside of a sheet, down a rafter, across a ceiling batten or along a duct, sometimes for several metres, before finding a low point where it can drop. So the wet patch on your ceiling tells you where the water left, not where it entered.

That is why a patch aimed at the stain almost never works, and why the diagnosis is worth paying for. We look for the entry point, working from the roof space where we can get into it, using moisture readings and thermal imaging where the cavity is closed. It is slower than guessing and it is the difference between fixing it once and fixing it three times.

The four things that are usually actually wrong

In the Illawarra, storm-related ceiling water is overwhelmingly one of these, and only one of them is a hole in the roof.

1. The gutter overflowed backwards. The single most common cause. Water goes over the back edge of the gutter instead of the front, into the eaves, down the cavity, out through the ceiling. Caused by debris, sag, a missing overflow provision or one downpipe serving too much roof. We go into this properly in why gutters overflow in Illawarra storms.
2. A flashing has failed. Where the roof meets a wall, a chimney, a vent or a pipe penetration. Flashings are the parts of a roof that move, and they are almost always the first thing to give in wind-driven rain.
3. Wind-driven rain got under sheeting or tiles. In an east coast low the rain is horizontal for hours. Water can be pushed up under laps and around fixings that are entirely watertight in ordinary vertical rain. This is why a roof that has never leaked can leak in one specific storm and then never again.
4. It is not roof water at all. On escarpment blocks the water is often arriving laterally from uphill, showing up in the sub-floor or at the slab edge, or rising because the stormwater system is full. Different problem, different fix, and replacing roof sheets will not touch it.

What we do when we arrive

First, whether it is safe to be up there at all. Then find the actual entry point rather than the exit. Then stop it, which in an active event may mean a temporary measure until conditions allow a proper repair, and we will say plainly which one you are getting.

Then the part people do not expect: check whether the roof was the problem or the symptom. If the gutters, downpipes, pits or stormwater lines are the underlying cause, repairing the roof alone means you will see us again after the next storm. We CCTV the stormwater line where it is warranted, because a silted or collapsed line is invisible from above and is a common reason a “fixed” roof keeps leaking.

And a written report with photographs and, where relevant, camera footage. That is what makes an insurance conversation straightforward rather than a negotiation.

The insurance side, honestly

We are not insurance advisers, so treat this as context. Storm and flood are defined separately in Australian policies. Since 2012 a single legal definition of flood applies to prescribed insurance contracts, covering water that has escaped from a lake, river, creek or other natural watercourse, reservoir, canal or dam. Storm cover is generally broader and commonly includes rainwater run-off and water overflowing from stormwater drains, though not every insurer treats run-off the same way, particularly where flood cover has been declined. Your product disclosure statement governs.

On maintenance: most storm policies do contain wear-and-tear or lack-of-maintenance exclusions, and Legal Aid NSW puts it plainly that policies generally will not pay for water damage caused by failure to keep a property in good condition. But an insurer cannot simply assert it. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority applies a proximate cause test, and in its published case studies on maintenance and gradual deterioration exclusions it has repeatedly found that insurers had not met the onus of establishing the exclusion applied.

Practically, that means three things. Photograph before you clean up. Keep dated invoices for gutter cleaning, roof work and drainage maintenance. And if you are knocked back, free help exists through AFCA and the Financial Rights Legal Centre’s Insurance Law Service.

Afterwards

Once it is dry, the useful thing is to find out why it happened, which is almost always cheaper than the repair was. A pre-season check of the gutters, overflow provisions, downpipe count and stormwater lines is the work that stops the next one. Start with the Illawarra storm season guide, or go straight to roof repairs, gutter repairs, stormwater and drainage or 24/7 emergency plumbing.