Making Places Better...One Building at a Time

Managing the Flood | September 8, 2010

The title is ironic.  Like we can manage a flood…Ask the people of Pakistan or New Orleans how they did that.

So far today we have had between 8 and 12 inches of rain, depending on where you are.  It wasn’t quite the  “biblical flood” we were all worried about earlier today, but still, it’s a lot of rain.  And guess what, most of our buildings leaked.

Being the conscientious stewards of real estate that we are, we feel bad when our buildings leak.  We seek solutions.  We don’t want it to happen again (however many times it does).  So today, when a trusted structural engineer we work with explained the following to me, it seemed worth repeating.

Barry Hendricks has helped us with a number of roof replacements, he’s written specs and helped us oversee contractors.  When we excitedly proposed a new roof drain solution today for one of our mid-rise buildings to head off future leaks, he suggested we take a deep breath and recognize that almost no roof is able to drain eight inches of water off its roof quickly enough because the storm drain system in Arlington (and for most cities) become overloaded when that much rain is coming down, so the water just has nowhere to go.

So if eight inches of water sits around for awhile, it will find a crack, slip through, and next thing you know, a tenant is unhappily finding it dripping on their important papers.    In the case of the mid-rise building in question, we discovered a bit of luck.  The roof decking is concrete.  If it were metal, eight inches of rain might have caused it to buckle under the weight and then we would have had problems.

What we’re doing is taking a deep breath, reviewing the leaks we had, and consider which ones really indicate a weakness that we need to address, and which ones would likely not occur again unless we have another  “act of God” rain.

Sometimes making places better can mean not simply throwing money at the problem.

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