Chimney Masonry Repair in Pico Rivera, CA

Chimney Masonry Repair for Pico Rivera Homeowners

Pico Rivera sits between the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers, and that position defines the work. The city formed from the Pico and Rivera communities and built out heavily in the 1950s as families moved into the tracts on the old ranch land. Two local factors matter for chimneys. The first is groundwater and the river bottom soils: ground moisture here is higher than in the drier tracts to the south, and persistently damp footings under a heavy masonry stack encourage rising damp and salt bloom in the lower brickwork, which we find on the chimney breast inside houses as often as outside. The second is the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake, whose epicentre was effectively next door. Pico Rivera took real masonry damage in that event, and as in Whittier a good deal of it was repaired at the surface without anyone examining the flue liner. Between damp working from the bottom and old shear cracks left from the top, a camera survey tells you far more here than an exterior look ever will.

River-bottom soils and high ground moisture, plus unresolved 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake damage in 1950s masonry.

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.