Roof Work Leaves Apartment Tenants Under the Weather

When tenants at Park Glenn Apartments got word that their roofs would be renovated, they took precaution by covering their furniture with thin sheets of plastic.

They worried that the open-beam ceilings might produce some dust.

They never expected to find themselves lying in bed covered with a thick blanket of mud.

“I could have taken a shower in this place,” Donna Beck said Monday at her apartment on 200 S. Glenn Drive. “The water was coming right through the roof.”

The weekend’s rain seeped through cracks in about a dozen apartments in the 150-unit complex, causing mud damage is many cases. Low on plastic sheeting, a work crew left the site Friday without adequately covering the roof of the building, said tenants and apartment management officials.

“When I woke up Saturday, I could see the sunlight through the ceiling,” Joshua Benton, 20, said Monday. “My face was completely wet.”

The apartment Benton shares with his mother received some water damage.

“I’m not the best housekeeper in the world, but this is ridiculous,” said Joshua’s mother, Sandra Vaughan, standing inside the musky-smelling apartment. Most of her furniture was piled in one corner and covered with plastic sheeting.

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Donna Beck’s roommate, Letty Roybal, 41, was more distressed. She, Beck, and Beck’s daughter were among the tenants who received the worst damage. Most of their furniture--including sofas, beds and chairs--was thoroughly soaked. Even their clothes were covered in muck.

Like other tenants at the affordable-housing complex, they were forced to use their own money to check into hotels over the weekend.

“If we were in townhomes in a certain part of Camarillo, we would not be treated this way,” Roybal said. “They’re cutting corners because we’re low-income. We may not have any money, but we’re not stupid. We deserve to be treated like human beings.”

Officials at Village Property Management Inc., the Irvine company which owns the complex, blamed the fiasco on the roofing company, Central Roofing, based in Gardena.

“The foreman of the roofing company said he knew there was a 10% chance of rain,” said complex supervisor Darin Hord. “That’s why he brought the plastic. But he didn’t bring enough of it.”

Hord said he wanted to cover the cost of hotels for tenants, but he was unable to contact officials at the corporate office in Irvine and get authorization.

An official at the office there declined to comment.

Scott Olsen, a Central Roofing production manager, acknowledged that the crew ran out of plastic sheeting, but blamed most of the problem on Mother Nature.

“They put plastic over those apartments but the wind blew it off in some sections,” Olsen said. He said some tenants failed to cover their interior property as the company advised.

“If the items had been covered, most of the damage would have been minor,” he said. He and management officials were checking each apartment Monday to assess damages.

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Neither the management nor the roofing company would commit to covering the cost of hotels for tenants still unable to stay in their apartments. Crews worked Monday to patch the roof holes, but the company said it would take weeks to finish the job.

“The tenants will be taken care of,” apartment manager Lorraine Hord said, but that provided little comfort to Brenda Chambers. The 23-year-old tenant came home from a weekend in Bakersfield to find a pool of muddy water in the middle of her living room.

She held up a wet and dirty quilt hand-stitched by her late grandmother. She said her grandmother had given her the quilt for her high school graduation.

“There’s no way to replace a gift like this,” she said.