Drone services in Brixham

Brixham takes easterly gales straight into the harbour and the Berry Head headland catches wind from every direction, which makes this the most exposed part of the bay by a clear margin.

Ridge, hip and verge fixings are worked hard here in a way they are not two miles round the coast, and the failures repeat in the same places year after year.

The rendered and painted cottages on the harbour slopes take the salt directly, and render that has blown behind a painted surface hides the state of what is underneath it entirely.

Fixings are the specific weakness. Salt and constant movement work at a nail or a clip until it lets go, and a roof that looks perfectly sound can be held on by considerably less than it was designed to be.

The fishermen's cottages are small, tightly packed and stacked up the slopes around the harbour, and that combination makes conventional access close to impossible on many of them.

There is frequently nowhere to stand a scaffold that is not somebody else's property, and the streets are too narrow for a tower. That is the practical reason so much of the survey work here happens from the air.

Roofs also discharge onto one another on a slope like this, so a failure on an upper property becomes a problem for the one below it, and establishing which is which needs a view from above.

Clay pantile is common alongside slate, and pantiles on an exposed slope lift at the verge before anything else goes.

The colour-washed render that makes the harbour front look the way it does is also a maintenance liability, because a painted surface hides the state of the render underneath and only shows a problem once a patch actually comes away.

This is a working port with a fish market, so flights near the harbour are planned around what is happening on the quay rather than dropped in unannounced.

The launch point matters more here than almost anywhere else on the list, because open ground is scarce and the obvious spots are busy.

Berry Head is a national nature reserve, which adds disturbance to the list of things planned around on that side of the town.

Storm damage and evidence for claims make up a large share of it, particularly in the weeks after an easterly blow, when several enquiries usually arrive in the same few days.

Marine and hospitality businesses account for most of the picture work: the harbour, the fleet and the headland photograph well and cannot be shown from ground level.

Flat roofs on harbourside extensions are the third recurring subject, and they fail in the same way flat roofs fail everywhere, just faster because of the salt.

Fish processing and marine trade premises bring their own roofs into it too: large-span sheet, extraction plant and gutters that take a hammering from salt air and from what goes through them.