A Rain of Terror Falls on a City of Neglected Roofs

Call it L.A.--as in “Leaks Alot.”

Even having a roof over their heads hasn’t kept some people dry from the rain.

So what if Washington leads the nation in political leaks? Los Angeles has a good share of the wet kind.

In medical complexes. In office buildings. In homes. Even 65 feet underground in the city’s 3-year-old subway.

Roofers in Drip City reported a downpour of calls for help Thursday. “We’re flooded like the streets were,” said Tina Leyssius at Bilt-Well Roofing in Los Angeles, where the waiting list for repairs to residential roofs surged to two weeks.

“You come over here and you’ll see us doing rain dances,” said Barry Eden, marketing director of Allied Roofing in Santa Clarita, which reported a 50% increase in calls since Wednesday’s storm.

Dozens of five-gallon buckets could be found in the city’s five subways stations--even though the Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent $200,000 last year to seal more than 800 leaks.

An MTA spokeswoman said the subway leaks were as bad as they have ever been--and they “pailed” in comparison to the leaks at the MTA’s spiffy new Union Station transit center where the ceiling was still dripping Thursday, even though it had stopped raining.

“I can’t believe all the leaks,” said subway rider Jay Stark. “It doesn’t boost the public’s confidence in the rail system.” But, he added, “at least it doesn’t have the egg smell anymore”--a reference to gas leaks.

“Shame on us,” said MTA board member Nick Patsaouras, who also had to deal with leaks in his Tarzana home.

“It shouldn’t happen, but it does,” said MTA Board Chairman Larry Zarian, adding that he will seek an explanation.

Some riders didn’t seem to care. Adrian Blas used a bucket for a seat while waiting for a train; fortunately for him, it wasn’t raining at the time.

Elsewhere around town, workers from Belvedere Roofing of East Los Angeles lugged five-gallon buckets of tar onto the flat roof of La Paz Medical Group on Alvarado Street. They were needed to plug suspected leaks around air conditioning ducts.

Buckets also were catching drips coming into two examination rooms.

“It happens every time it rains,” said clinic owner Dr. Loghman Abdian.

One East Los Angeles company, Hoover Roofing, sent a work crew to downtown Los Angeles after getting a frantic call for help from a fabric shop owner.

“Her cloth was getting wet and she was almost crying,” said Susan Pak, a secretary at the roofing company. “If the roof was fixed during the summer, they’re not going to find out until later, when it starts raining, whether or not it’s leaking.”

While some roofing contractors were deluged with pleas for help, Guszpav Marokipy of Van Nuys, owner of Golden Bear Roofing, said calls to his firm were only trickling in.

“Usually, we get a lot of calls the minute people hear rain is coming. Not this time. People don’t have money.”

Augustus Brown can relate to that. He’s looking for $3 million to plug leaks and repair water damage at his house.

Brown is resident curator at the landmark Ennis-Brown House on a Los Feliz hillside.

The structure, designed in 1924 by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, features expanses of flat roof over walls of custom-cast concrete blocks.

The 1994 Northridge quake opened cracks in some of the Mayan-style blocks to water seepage. On Wednesday, drips appeared in several hallways, the main living room and a bedroom.

Brown threw down newspapers and put out five aluminum turkey-basting pans to catch the leaks and prevent damage to polished teak flooring.

In La Crescenta, Alan Erwin hadn’t taken much note when winds whipping through his neighborhood rearranged some of his roof’s shingles. Until Wednesday morning, that is, when the skies opened and a steady trickle of water splashed into his laundry room.

“As usual, I procrastinated too long. I waited until it happened,” Erwin said.

Roofing experts say that sociology plays a role in Southern California’s leak problem.

Many Southland residents, they say, are into vanity roofing, where the facade is more important than the inner workings. And as with earthquakes, many Angeleno homeowners and businesses ignore the certainty that some day or some month in the future, it will rain again.

“In Chicago, they can plan on having adverse weather so they get their roofs repaired in a timely basis,” said Ricki Stricker, president of the Roofing Contractors Assn. of California.

“A lot of corporations we deal with here do their budgeting in January and February but hold the money until September or October and then when it looks like it’ll rain, they want it done.”

Too often, Stricker said, residents pay for aesthetically pleasing tile roofs, but do not spring for proper waterproofing materials underneath.

Dave Poindexter, manager of training for the Colorado-based Roofing Industry Educational Institute, said building codes in Southern California “are not as strict as some of those in northern climates because you don’t experience the freeze and thaw and thermal cycling.”

Yet the benefits of the region’s climate are in large part illusory.

“Because of exposure to the sun, asphalt-based products are subject to degradation,” Poindexter said. “As they age, they oxidize and harden and combined with the seismic zone you’re in, the movement on a fairly brittle product can fracture the roofing system pretty easily.”

Indeed, the snow so common to the Midwest and Northeast can actually lead to less leaks.

“There’s a difference in the pitch of the roofs back east,” said LeEllen Williams, executive director of the El Monte-based Roofing Contractors Assn. of Southern California. “They’re pitched more steeply than in Southern California because they want to get the snow off the roofs. Here, they’re pitched lower.”

Martin Cabralo reported that rain Wednesday night caved in a 2-foot-by-2-foot chunk of his Canoga Park apartment’s ceiling onto his bed as he slept. He was splashed with the day’s precipitate.

“I slept on a bed with a pot in the middle so it’d catch the water,” Cabralo said.

Times staff writers Bob Pool and Larry Gordon and correspondent Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this story.