Roofers still working through storm backlog

Six months on from Storm Goretti, a roofer in Guernsey says his team are still working through the backlog.

The storm in January caused widespread disruption and damage to properties and walls and felled trees with many roads blocked.

Andy Gavey, from Sarnian Roofing, said: "At the time it was absolutely chaotic, it was just like a call centre down here. We had five people manning their phone calls and that was a job to keep up as well."

"We were busy anyway because we did all the major projects on the island, but to get all these repairs absolutely just threw us completely out of our tracks."

He said: "We had to keep guys on the major projects as well trying to keep a few teams to sort of just help everybody out as much as we could.

"People have been very patient and really understanding which I must admit has been very helpful for us."

"We keep a massive stock of old roof tiles, ridges, everything really - so if somebody's roof blew off, we could always match the same tile instead of trying to find something.

"We had a major backlog so we are only just close to finishing the last 250 odd jobs that's leftover so we did say at the time in the storm that we could take up most of the year and it has proved about right so we we are slowly getting through them.

"I'm hoping the next two months and we should complete them all."

Follow BBC Guernsey on X and Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to channel.islands@bbc.co.uk.