Chimney Masonry Repair in Long Beach, CA

Chimney Masonry Repair for Long Beach Homeowners

Long Beach gives us more variety in a single city than the rest of our service area combined. Belmont Heights, Rose Park and the Craftsman streets around Bluff Park went up in the 1910s and 1920s, and a great many of those chimneys were built with no flue liner at all — brick straight against brick, exactly as it was done at the time. Bixby Knolls and California Heights follow in the 1930s and 1940s with terracotta tile, and Los Altos and the east side are postwar tract work with lighter stacks. What connects all of it is the harbour. Salt air coming off the water drives chloride into mortar joints and eats galvanised caps, dampers and flashing at a rate you simply do not see fifteen miles inland. We replace more rusted-through caps in Long Beach than anywhere else we work. The historic district overlays in Belmont Heights and Bluff Park also mean visible exterior masonry work can need design review, which is worth knowing before the scaffolding goes up rather than after.

Unlined 1920s brick near the shore, postwar tile-lined stacks inland, and salt-air corrosion on caps and dampers throughout.

Masonry chimneys in this county fail from the top down and from water, not from fire. The crown cracks, rain gets into the brickwork, and then the marine layer keeps it from ever fully drying. Wet mortar in a coastal-influenced climate goes soft and sandy, the joints open, and the freeze-thaw cycle people assume is a cold-climate problem happens here too on a smaller scale — enough to spall the face off brick over twenty years. Near the water it is worse. Salt air across Long Beach, Torrance and Palos Verdes drives chloride into the mortar and corrodes anything ferrous inside the stack. The other half of our repair work is seismic. A chimney is a heavy unreinforced cantilever bolted to a light wood house, which is why it is the first thing to crack in a quake and why so much of the pre-1960 brick around Whittier and Long Beach is carrying old damage that was patched cosmetically and never actually repaired.