Chimney Masonry Repair in Santa Fe Springs, CA

Chimney Masonry Repair 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.

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.