Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Forest Park, GA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Forest Park Homeowners

Forest Park is close enough to base that we get there easily, and its housing is mostly compact post-war building from the 1940s through the 1960s. The chimneys are simple, single-flue and unglamorous, which in practice means neglected — nobody frames a Forest Park chimney as a feature, so nobody thinks about it. The most common finding is straightforward: a crown that has cracked through, a cap that went missing years ago, and a flue that has taken water for long enough that the damper has rusted solid. All of it is fixable, and none of it gets better on its own.

Compact 1940s-1960s single-flue chimneys, often long unattended; cracked crowns, missing caps and seized dampers are the usual findings.

A chimney is the only part of a roof that is deliberately full of holes, and in a climate that delivers as much rain as Atlanta does, the odds catch up with it. Water gets in at four places: a cracked crown, failed flashing where the stack passes through the roof, a missing or damaged cap, and brickwork that has become porous enough to drink. The difficulty is that the stain inside the house rarely appears under the actual entry point — water tracks down the outside of the flue and shows up a storey below. Sealing where the stain is achieves nothing, which is why people end up paying for the same leak three times.