When you look at the unpainted neighbors’ roof though you can see that their skylights have been replaced, more recently because these skylights are much newer.
Looking at all these different signs, you can start the piece together a little bit of the history and understand more of who left this trash behind. The guilty party wasn’t one single party, it looks like it was actually combination of both contractors. The painted roof contractors left their buckets behind and then the neighbor’s contractor, where the roof is unpainted, used the other neighbor’s trash buckets to stuff their trash into where they then discarded it and abandoned it on top of the painted roof!
The trash that was stuffed into these buckets includes all sorts of different materials, they built up extra material that was used around the edges of the replaced skylights, and even debris of masonry bricks and mortar from the top of the parapet wall or chimney at the far other side.
If you look at the current roof systems, on both sides of the area where the trash was found, you can see that these are both modified bitumen membranes. Built-up roofs are still used here and there, but installed new very infrequently today. Instead, about 40 to 60 years ago, modified bitumen membranes came onto the market and started replacing the old built up roofs. As a side note, when modified bitumen roll roofing came out as a single-ply installation type of roof membrane, it also started significantly replacing the very common standing seam metal roofs as well.
The curious part of this analysis, from a forensic perspective, is it doesn’t make sense of how we would find built-up roof debris thrown away in the middle of what looks to be two roofs made from modified bitumen. The answer is likely that when the neighbor at the unpainted roof system was replacing their skylights. In replacing their skylights, they cut into the materials around the edges of the curb of their skylights. Even though it’s a modified bitumen roof system on top, there is likely an old prior roof underneath of this modified bitumen roof system.
That old built up roof system probably overlapped the prior skylight curb and had to be cut away during the installation of the new skylights. This theory is highly likely and explains where this trash came from. It didn’t come from the roof where the trash was found. It came from the neighbor’s contractors.
Low slope roofs are interesting. The best way to install a new flat roof is to remove the old prior roof. But when people are trying to cut corners or even save costs legitimately, they can overlay the existing roof. However, if there’s more than one existing roof system on top of the roof structure, you can only overlay it with one new membrane, per the building code.
The problem is that really low quality contractors will do new work in a way that ignores the building code. Sometimes we see as many as five or even six distinct layers of roof systems have been installed, one on top of the next. Many times in that process of installing roof systems on top of the decks, they should have removed all of the underlying roof systems. However, in these cases, they skipped those steps every time. Skipping those steps does save money, but it’s not the right thing to do.
It looks like there’s even a mop head, maybe used in another Roofing application of an older BUR type roof system.
In trying to figure out who this trash belonged to, we took a close look at the transition from the newer roof to the older roof. Even though the newer roof was installed after the modified bitumen at the painted roof, it doesn’t mean that the trash necessarily came from this roof. But when you look closely at the seam, at the overlap on top of the parapet it looks like the painted part is completely and entirely underneath the newer unpainted membrane. That means that this paint may have been applied before the unpainted roof was ever installed and therefore means that these buckets have been left up here before the new roof was installed.
But there’s a bunch of modified bitumen scraps inside of those buckets. It’s also possible that painted roof’s contractors left their paint buckets all over their rooftop and then when the unpainted roof’s neighbor put that roof on, the contractor stuffed their trash inside of the neighbors abandoned and discarded buckets. All of it of course is not perfectly clear, but clearly there are many signs of poor workmanship here and this abandoned trash is just another to add to the list of things being done to cut corners by many roofing contractors.
We provide this information here on our blog, and our website, to help our customers and future clients, and we recommend every building owner in DC who values the longevity of their roof (and their investments) and building use a contractor who values the simple and important principles of proper roof construction like Dupont Roofing DC.
Our company specializes in flat roofing here in Washington DC and we’re happy to help building owners of almost all types. Learn more about our company and the proper techniques of working with roofing on historic buildings in Washington DC here on our blog at DupontRoofingDC.com, and you can call us at (202) 840-8698 and email us at dupontroofingdc@gmail.com. We are happy to help and at least talk through options.
