Chimney Masonry Repair in Whittier, CA

Chimney Masonry Repair for Whittier Homeowners

Whittier has the oldest and best housing stock in our service area and, for a chimney company, the most consequential recent history. Uptown and the streets around Whittier College carry Craftsman and early brick houses from the 1900s and 1910s, much of it unlined. Then there is the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake. That event did enormous damage to unreinforced masonry here, and a great deal of it was repaired cosmetically — the visible crack pointed up, the stack left standing, the flue inside never examined. We still find the consequences on camera nearly forty years later: shear cracks running through terracotta liners in houses whose owners have no idea anything is wrong, because from the hearth it looks fine. Up in Friendly Hills and College Hills the picture is different again, with 1960s and 1970s hillside houses, tall exposed stacks catching wind off the ridge, and access that frequently needs planning. If you own pre-1960 brick in Whittier and it has not had a camera survey, that is the single thing worth doing.

Pre-1930 unlined brick in Uptown, unresolved 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake damage, and exposed hillside stacks in Friendly Hills.

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.