When It Rains, Jobs Pour In for Drought-Weary Roofers
For months, the Great Recession wrought havoc on the roofing business Howard Randol’s grandfather and father started at the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Randol’s San Gabriel-based business scaled back operations; the work force of more than 40 employees was cut in half.
Then came this month’s pounding, windy rains, bringing with them a bumper crop of leaky roofs and a shower of calls to roofing companies.
When the rains started in December, Randol began rebuilding his staff. On Tuesday, he hired six employees and was running newspaper ads for more workers.
“Right now there aren’t enough roofers,” Randol said. Normally his company has a two-week backlog of roofing jobs. Now it is two months. “There are people that we gave estimates to two years ago that are calling us now to do the job,” he said.
Alan Warner, office manager for Stone Roofing Co. in Azusa, reports a similar situation. “We’ve had literally hundreds of calls,” he said. “We’re getting 60 to 80 leak calls a day. There is no way to handle them all.”
Marty Stout, owner of a Fontana roofing company that works throughout the San Gabriel Valley, sees a pattern.
“When it’s raining, people are begging us to fix their roof. As soon as the rain lets up, they quit begging.” he said. “Then by June, we call them and start begging. Next October, they start begging again.”
The explanation for the abrupt shift is simple, said LeEllen Williams, executive director of Roofing Contractors Assn. of Southern California, based in El Monte. “We’ve had seven years of drought and people have not really cared if they had a hole in their roof. Now with all the rain, we’ve had people in a state of panic.”
Drenched by a pounding rain yet moving sure-footed as a cat, Randol crept Monday along the ridge of a brittle red-tile roof that had been leaking for weeks.
Below him, inside the two-story San Marino house where worried homeowners peered from rain-splattered windows, a steady drip, drip, drip of a leak fell from a yellow-stained ceiling and dropped into a pan on an upstairs bedroom floor.
Randol shook out a large sheet of plastic his employees had placed on the roof earlier this month. A waterfall cascaded onto the driveway.
“As long as it’s raining, there’s not much I can do except this,” he said as he laid out plastic over even more of the roof.
Since the recession started, roofing contractors say, customers commonly have wanted repairs rather than the expense of a new roof.
In some cases, homeowners were content to tack down tarps and plastic sheeting, which withstood the less intense rains of recent years. “Sometimes all people can afford is a plastic tarp rather than spending $2,000 to $5,000 for a roof,” Randol said.
But homeowners are finding that tarps are no match for flood-inducing, windblown rains.
Even when the damage is minor, people are reluctant to face inevitable repairs. Theresa Kosak of Eagle Rock has noticed for some time that the hearth above her fireplace in her high-ceiling living room has been peeling. She ignored it until the major rains started two weeks ago.
A leak was apparently coming in through a gap, perhaps earthquake-induced, between the roof flashing and the chimney. Some patching tar took care of the problem Monday.
“I’ve been watching the television news and seeing these houses sliding down the hill, in Malibu and Laguna,” she said. “So I think: ‘I have just a little water in my fireplace. This is just piddly stuff.’ ”
Kosak’s situation, roofers say, is more common than cases of roofs cracked apart by mudslides or blown off in tornadoes such as the ones that hit Covina and Pomona in the last week.
In most cases, roofers say, the leaks spring not from the roofing material but from all the other equipment up there.
Favorite leak-sprouting spots are around skylights, windows, kitchen and bathroom roof vents, doorways, air conditioning and heating units and their related duct systems, and evaporative coolers. Inadequate or clogged drains and faulty gutters also give water an in.
“Bottles, cans, tennis balls, rags, pants, everything imaginable winds up in gutters and drains,” Warner said.
Randol pointed out tiny gaps that appeared in the seals of a duct system on the roof of a Glendale house. Like a chef icing a cake, he spread black tar over the gaps.
“You have basically a vacuum cleaner up here that sucks in a lot of water even if there is a mere pinprick of a hole,” Randol said.
Inside, where the dining room ceiling was stained, this observation was little consolation to the homeowner, who had a new roof put on just last year and did not expect to have any leaks, from the roof or otherwise, including from the cooling and heating system.
For Gladys Valencia, the storms brought not horror but a sense of self-satisfaction.
The Alhambra homeowner first noticed a leak in her living room on a rainy December day. Right away, she called a roofer she knew. A few weeks and $3,000 later, she had a new roof.
Then she left for a Caribbean vacation, just as this month’s rains began. When she returned last week and arrived to a downpour at the airport, she could allow herself a few moments of smugness. She had beaten the rain.
