As Captain Jack Sparrow would say: "Not good! Not good!"
There was a loud rumble on Saturday afternoon, followed by a lot of dust. Once that had settled, literally and metaphorically, it became apparent that a 4-flue chimney stack on the east end of our roof had collapsed. Half of it fell in through the roof and my son's bedroom ceiling; the other half fell down the outside of the house onto the roof of the outbuilding, some of it bouncing into the neighbour's garden and narrowly missing her.
Narrow escapes all round.
It being the weekend, emergency roofers were hard to come by, but with the help of a friend (Thank you, Kev. Thank you again...) we cleared almost 300 whole bricks and a skip (dumpster) full of rubble from inside the house, and got a tarpaulin over the gaping hole in the roof/wall.
Here are a couple of pictures to give you some idea of what confronted us:
Bedroom. Under the 'upper' slew of bricks there's a broken 8" oak beam which took a huge amount of the force of the collapsing masonry, and in doing so probably prevented worse damage elsewhere. Under the 'lower' at slew you can probably just make out a pillow. Not a comfortable thought.
Neighbour's garden. This is what a ton or so of bricks does to a tiled roof from about 25 feet up. Interestingly, all four of the 'flue caps' (by definition the highest part of the chimney) survived undamaged. You can see a couple of them in the flowerbed, just behind one of the rose bushes. Luckily (by some definitions of the word) the outbuilding is also ours. Much as I don't like what's happened to it, it would be far worse if we'd done that to someone else's roof...
According to the insurance assessor, the strongest winds recorded locally over the weekend - at around 50mph - were registered at almost exactly the time this happened.
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Posted by John Sandell on April 03, 2007 at 08:27 AM GMT+00:00 #
And it could have been so much worse...
Posted by Robin Wilton on April 03, 2007 at 03:55 PM GMT+00:00 #
Posted by Drew on April 05, 2007 at 11:27 AM GMT+00:00 #
Posted by Michelle on April 11, 2007 at 10:16 PM GMT+00:00 #