Chimney Inspections in Santa Fe Springs, CA

Chimney Inspections for Santa Fe Springs Homeowners

Santa Fe Springs is unusual in being mostly industrial with residential neighbourhoods set into it, so the housing comes in distinct pockets rather than a continuous fabric. Around Heritage Park and the Clarke Estate there is genuine age and some fine early work; the Los Nietos area and the tracts to the south are largely 1950s. The city also has a long oil and industrial history, which shows up in two ways relevant to a chimney. The first is soil: portions of the city have been worked, filled and re-graded over a century, and settlement on made ground puts stress on rigid masonry stacks. The second is air. Heavy industry and truck routes deposit a persistent film on roofs and into open flues, and combined with the marine layer that produces the same dense mat on the smoke shelf we see in Paramount. Because residential streets here sit close to commercial buildings and yards, spark arrestor screens are worth taking seriously on any chimney where wood is actually burned.

Residential pockets within industrial land, settlement on made ground, and heavy airborne deposition into open flues.

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.