Drone inspection services in Newton Abbot

The Great Western works shaped this town, and the industrial pattern still follows it: large-span sheds close to the line, then the later trading estates spreading onto the flat ground around them. Brunel and Forde Road carry a mix of 1970s and 1980s portal frame with a good deal of asbestos cement roof sheeting still in place on the older units, and Heathfield out on the Bovey basin clay adds a heavier industrial layer again.

Asbestos cement is the thing that changes the calculation here more than anywhere else on this list. It is brittle, it is fragile by definition, and walking it is a genuine hazard even with crawl boards. Every year a few people are seriously hurt falling through roofs of exactly this type. Recording it from the air means nobody is on it, which is not a marketing point, it is the actual reason a lot of managing agents in this town moved to aerial inspection in the first place.

What the camera picks up on that material is specific: hairline cracking radiating from fixings, delamination on the weather face, moss colonising the sheet laps, and the cracked or slipped sheets that let daylight and water into a unit long before anyone reports it.

The town sits on the flood plain where the Teign turns tidal, ringed by hills. It is low-lying and damp, mist comes off the river, and shaded surfaces hold moss and lichen readily. Less wind-exposed than the coast, but the estuary funnels easterlies through in winter.

For commercial roofs that combination is a growth problem more than a wind problem. Organic matter builds on the sheets, washes into the gutters, and the gutter never gets the dry spell it needs to clear itself. Rooflight sheets go green and lose the light the unit was designed to get for free, which is a cost nobody attributes to the roof.

Easterly weather is the exception and it is worth planning for. It arrives from a direction most of this stock was not detailed to face, so the flashings and verges on the eastern side of a building are usually the ones with a story to tell.

Silted box gutters, cracked and patched asbestos cement, rooflights past their working life, and plant that has been added to a roof over twenty years without anybody keeping a record of what is bolted through the covering and where.

The last of those is the quiet one. A roof with six penetrations detailed at construction and eleven present today has five details somebody made up on the day, and those are where a report earns its money.