Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Hapeville, GA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Hapeville Homeowners

Hapeville is a compact city of mostly modest homes, a good number of them built for workers at the Ford plant that stood here until 2006. The chimneys match the houses: single-flue, unassuming, often serving one small firebox. They are easy to overlook, and that is exactly the problem — a small chimney on a small house accumulates creosote just as readily as a grand one, and because nobody thinks of it as a feature, it can go a very long time between looks. The other Hapeville particular is proximity to the airport, and the amount of airborne grit that settles into an uncapped flue.

Compact 1940s-1950s single-flue chimneys on modest homes, often long-neglected; airport-adjacent grit accumulation in uncapped flues.

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.