Chimney Inspections in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Chimney Inspections for Rancho Palos Verdes Homeowners

Rancho Palos Verdes is the most demanding place we work and the one where a chimney is least likely to be ordinary. The housing is largely 1960s and 1970s custom and semi-custom hillside building, with tall architectural stacks on steeply pitched roofs, often exposed on three sides. Three local conditions drive everything. The first is marine exposure: fog, salt and wind coming straight off the water, which corrodes any ferrous metal at the top of a stack and keeps masonry damp far longer than it dries. The second is wind loading on those tall exposed chimneys, which is why caps here must be mechanically fixed rather than friction fitted. The third is ground movement, and it is not historical: the Portuguese Bend landslide complex is active, and in the affected areas structures are being sheared continuously rather than in single events. A chimney in a moving zone will crack again after it is repaired, and we would rather tell an owner that plainly than take money for a repair that will not hold.

Tall exposed 1960s-70s hillside stacks, heavy salt and fog corrosion, high wind loading, and active land movement at Portuguese Bend.

An inspection is the only part of this trade that tells you something you could not otherwise know. A flue can look perfectly sound from the hearth and be cracked through two storeys up. That matters more here than in most of the country because of what the ground does. The 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake put hairline shears through masonry across the Whittier and Pico Rivera area that have quietly widened ever since, and the Portuguese Bend slide is still moving under parts of Rancho Palos Verdes today. Add the ordinary rate of settlement in the postwar tracts built on old dairy and farm land in Cerritos, Artesia and Norwalk, and cracked flue tiles are common in houses that have never had a bad fire. We also do a lot of point-of-sale work. A Level 2 inspection is what a lender, an insurer or a careful buyer's agent will ask for, and a written report with photographs settles the question rather than starting an argument.