What to Do About a Chimney After a Gale: Safe First Steps

The first few minutes: keep clear

The most dangerous moment is often the morning after, when everyone wants to go out and look. A damaged stack can drop bricks or pots without warning, particularly while the wind is still gusting, so the first job is to decide which part of the garden or pavement lies below it and keep people and pets out of that area.

If a driveway, path or conservatory roof sits under the stack, treat it as off limits until the chimney has been checked. Park cars elsewhere if you can, and close the doors to any room directly below a damaged section of roof. A rope or a couple of chairs is enough to mark an exclusion zone for the household.

Inside, be careful with any fire or stove that vents into the stack. If you notice smoke coming back into the room, a smell of soot or any sign that debris has fallen into the flue, leave the appliance unlit. Flues, sweeping and appliance safety belong to a HETAS or Gas Safe registered installer or a sweep, not to a roofer.

Checking from the ground

Once it is light and the wind has eased, walk round the house at a distance and look at the stack from more than one side. Binoculars or the zoom on a phone help a lot. Compare the stack with how it looked before, and look for pots out of line, missing or tilted cowls, fresh pale patches where mortar has fallen away and any visible gap at the base.

Then look at what has landed. Lumps of mortar, broken pot fragments or pieces of brick in gutters, on a flat roof, on a bay or on the lawn below are the clearest evidence of something giving way above. Our guide to What to Look For on a Chimney From the Ground goes through the signs in more detail, and Is It the Chimney? Working Out Where the Water Is Getting In helps if you are not sure whether a stain or leak is coming from the stack at all.

It is tempting to go for a closer look from a ladder or an upstairs window. Please do not. A loose course can come away under the lightest touch, and wet slates or tiles are slippery. What you can see safely from the ground is enough to describe the problem on the phone.

Recording damage for an insurance claim

Photograph everything before anything is cleared up. Take wide shots that show the house and the area below, then closer shots of the debris where it fell, and any visible damage to the stack, roof, gutters, fences or cars. Dates and times are useful, and so is a note of the weather. If you have older photographs of the house that show the stack, keep them.

Check your policy for storm damage and what it says about reporting. This is general information and not insurance or legal advice, so read your own documents or ask your insurer what evidence they want. In many cases, an insurer will ask for a written description of the damage and its cause from a contractor, and sometimes for an invoice for emergency work.

Keep anything that has fallen if it is safe to pick up from the ground, because an assessor may want to see it. Write down what you heard and when: a crash in the night, a sudden change in the wind or a smell of soot afterwards all help to date the damage, and a note made that morning is more reliable than memory weeks later. Do not throw away loose pieces from the roof or gutter until you have recorded them. If you can, ask the contractor to describe what they found in writing.

When to call, and what a visit involves

Call promptly if bricks or pots have fallen, if the stack is leaning, if a lump of flaunching has dropped, or if water is coming in near the chimney breast. We offer 24-hour emergency call-outs Monday to Friday, and a clear description plus a few photographs from the ground helps us decide how urgent it is and what equipment to bring.

On a first visit the aim is to make the situation safe and find out what is wrong. That might mean taking down loose courses or a failed pot so they cannot fall, and sealing the top of the stack against rain. Anything beyond that is planned properly, with the permanent repair priced in a free written quotation. If you are in or near chimney repairs in Heswall, mention that when you ring.

Be wary of anyone who knocks on the door after a storm offering to make repairs on the spot. Ask for a written quotation first and check they are insured, and compare it with the points in What Should Be on a Chimney Repair Quotation?.

Temporary measures, and why they stay temporary

Temporary protection exists, but it is for people equipped to work at height. A damaged stack might be covered with a tarpaulin or a weighted cap to stop water entering, loose masonry might be taken down to a safe level, or a pot removed and the flue covered. These are holding measures, and they are not a repair.

They also carry their own risks. A tarpaulin in a gale becomes a sail that can pull on the stack or rip itself off, and a cover that blocks a flue used by an appliance can cause dangerous fumes to back up into the house. For that reason, nothing should be placed over a flue that is in use without advice from a HETAS or Gas Safe registered installer.

Once the weather settles, the permanent repair can be planned properly, whether that is repointing, re-forming the head, lead renewal or a part rebuild. If the damage looks structural, or extends below the roof, a structural engineer may need to be involved.