Chimney Repair Burbank, CA

Burbank's housing was built around the studios, and you can read the construction dates off the street grid. Magnolia Park went up largely in the 1920s and 1930s as Warner Bros. expanded on Olive Avenue, giving that district its tight rows of Craftsman and Spanish Revival bungalows with full masonry fireplaces. The Rancho equestrian district south of Riverside Drive followed in the same era with larger lots and larger chimneys. Then the 1946 to 1960 boom filled the east and north of the city with ranch houses, and the foothill tracts below the Verdugos came later still. Each era left a different chimney, and each needs a different repair.

The factor that sets Burbank apart from the rest of the Valley is vibration, and there are three sources of it stacked on top of each other. Hollywood Burbank Airport sits inside the city with departure paths directly over residential streets, and the airport handles a high volume of operations for its size. The Interstate 5 and State Route 134 interchange carries very heavy traffic through the middle of the city. And the studio lots themselves — Warner Bros. on Olive, the Disney campus on Riverside, and the production facilities around them — run heavy equipment and construction more or less continuously.

Continuous low-grade vibration does not crack a sound chimney, but it accelerates every failure that has already started. A crown with a hairline crack opens faster. A mortar joint that has begun to recede loses material faster. Flashing that was troweled with tar rather than properly let into the brick separates sooner. In practice this means a Burbank chimney on a vibration-heavy street reaches the point of needing real repair several years earlier than the same chimney would on a quiet street in, say, Sherman Oaks.

The Verdugo fault runs along the eastern base of the Verdugo Mountains just northeast of Burbank, and the city took significant ground shaking in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. For homes in the foothill neighbourhoods — Wildwood Canyon, Dark Canyon, and the streets climbing above the Rancho — hillside settling adds a slow differential movement between the chimney stack and the house frame that shows up as a widening gap at the point where the chimney meets the wall. That gap is worth having looked at, because it is the path water takes into the framing.

Burbank sits between Griffith Park and the Verdugo Mountains, which makes it a wildlife corridor rather than merely a city with some animals in it. Raccoons move through the foothill neighbourhoods in numbers, and an uncapped flue is exactly the warm, defensible den a female wants in spring. We pull raccoon nests out of Burbank chimneys more than from any other city we serve. The damage is not just the blockage: nesting material packed against clay tile holds moisture against it for months, and the mortar joints behind it fail.

The second Burbank-specific issue is wind. Santa Ana conditions funnel down out of the Verdugo canyons with real force, and a chimney that has lost its cap or has a cracked crown is then a direct opening for embers during fire weather. The Verdugo foothills are a designated Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone and the city takes brush clearance seriously; a spark-arrestor cap in sound condition belongs in the same category of basic precaution. A stainless cap starts at $89 and is the cheapest piece of fire protection on the house.

Where we see galvanised caps, we recommend replacing them with stainless rather than repairing them. Galvanised steel in Burbank's temperature swing — hot dry afternoons, cool nights, repeated through a long summer — rusts through in a handful of years, and a rusted cap sheds iron staining down the brick face while it does it. Stainless costs more up front and then stops being a line item. Call (818) 536-7759 and we will tell you on the phone which one you have if you can describe it.