Where Fall River roofs actually leak
In a typical season the repair calls break down roughly the same way: about a third are flashing failures at chimneys, sidewalls and skylights; a quarter are cracked rubber pipe boots that split open after ten or so years in the sun; the rest are wind-lifted shingles, exposed nail heads, blocked valleys and ice damage at the eaves. Very few are a hole in the middle of an open shingle field.
That distinction matters because the stain on a ceiling is rarely directly under the entry point. Water follows the rafters and the underlayment downhill before it ever shows up inside, sometimes four or six feet from where it actually got in.
How the diagnosis works
The attic comes first, not the roof surface. Water stains on the underside of the deck, rusted nail tips and daylight through a gap tell more about the true path of the leak than the shingles do. Then the roof itself gets walked, with close attention to every penetration uphill from the stain.
Where the source is not obvious, a hose test isolates it section by section, lowest point first, while someone watches from inside. It takes half an hour or so and prevents the common mistake of replacing a chimney flashing when the real culprit was a pipe boot a few feet away.
The repairs themselves
Pipe boots get a new flashing rather than a bead of caulk over the crack. Step and counter flashing at chimneys is cut and installed new, with the counter flashing let into a mortar joint instead of surface-glued on top of the brick. Lifted shingles are resealed if the strip underneath is intact, and replaced outright if the shingle has creased.
Ice damage at the eave usually means the first two or three courses come off, the deck gets checked for soft spots, ice barrier is added or extended, and the courses are relaid with matched shingle where the product still exists. On a roof that never had barrier in the first place, this is the moment it goes in.
When repair stops making sense
A rough rule applies: if the repair would run more than a fifth of a full replacement and the roof has less than five years of service left, replacement is the better use of the money. That judgment gets written into the repair note in plain terms, so the decision sits with the homeowner and the numbers, not with a sales pitch.