Roofers Reign : Downpours Have Made Them the Most Popular People in Town

At this point, it’s hard for Jill Cole to work herself into a panic.

“I was asleep last night and I heard a noise, and I thought it was someone breaking in,” she said Tuesday. It wasn’t. It was her waterlogged ceiling falling down--again.

“I should be the pinup lady for Roofer’s Monthly,” said a weary Cole, whose house is plagued by water problems.

A lot of other soggy Westside homeowners were feeling similarly cursed after the recent weeks of seemingly constant, often wind-driven rain found leaks they never dreamed of or thought were fixed. The deluge was a mixed blessing for recession-plagued roofing contractors, who fielded hundreds of calls but couldn’t go out to do most repairs because it was too wet.

“Everybody thinks it’s a big boom time for roofers. But if you can’t work, you can’t work--no matter what the reason is,” said Pat Farrell, owner of Mar Vista Roofing Inc.

All that changed on Tuesday, when an army of stir-crazy roofers rose under clearing skies and took to their ladders once again. And stricken homeowners prepared to shell out serious cash for repairs that roofers blamed on years of neglect during the drought and on a onetime building boom that bred fly-by-night contractors and shoddy work.

“If you don’t see it, you don’t pay any attention. And the roof’s the last place you see it,” said Doug Mueller, sales manager for Permanent Roof Co. in West Los Angeles. “People cheaped out, and now they’re paying for it.”

Impatient calls to roofing companies tripled and quadrupled in the rainy weeks after Christmas from bucket-juggling homeowners whose roofs simply could no longer withstand the downpours. Most roofers were reporting at least a week’s backlog of business; in emergency cases, they were able to patch a leak with plastic, then hope for dry weather to allow them to do the job right.

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At $2,000 to $3,000 to fix a shingle roof and up to $10,000 for a full-scale replacement, the storms may spell a roofing contractor’s bonanza. That’s also good news for the scores of hourly workers who had to sit at home for weeks waiting for good weather.

“It’s great for business, but we need time to get to all the work,” said Susan Michael, who on Monday was scurrying from phone to phone at Unlimited Roofing in Mar Vista.

Many pleas were what Santa Monica roofer Don Haskins calls “junk calls”: leaky windows, skylights, ducts--not roofs. “To find leaks, sometimes you have to be a detective,” said Haskins, adding that he once “chased” a leak for two years before finding its source.

But in most cases, experts said, the problem was that roofs had not been properly maintained during six years of drought, when leaks just don’t have much of a chance to show up. “A lot of people just put them aside,” said Steve Harrer, who owns Coastal Roofing in Malibu. “We’re in a recession. A lot of people are out of work. A lot of people aren’t into doing roofs.”

Contractors said that most flat roofs ought to be inspected yearly and pitched roofs every other year. Most flat and shingle roofs, which bake and crack in the sun, are built to last 15 years; tile roofs can last 50 years.

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Harrer’s crew was waiting for a break in the weather to get to a job in Malibu Colony that he said had simply been put off too long. But he acknowledged that these were no garden-variety winter storms. Many leaks would only have appeared after the persistent rains, driven by wind. “Even if you have done a repair,” he said, “that saturation factor is so high right now, it’ll find that leak.”

Mueller and others in the roofing business said that a sub-industry of free-lance roofers cropped up in the 1980s, eager to cash in on the development boom. They often charged less than the established firms, whose prices reflected expensive workers’ compensation insurance, and they got a lot of business. Then many of them went out of business and left their former customers holding the, er, bucket.

“A lot of people took a chance with guys operating out of their pickup trucks,” Mueller said.

Some people simply were victims of lousy timing. Cathy and Dave Zanzinger are renovating their Mar Vista house to make room for a baby due in April. The contractors got the old roof off shortly before the rains first hit last month.

“It’s pretty frustrating. It seems like we started the demolition on the house the week it started raining,” Cathy Zanzinger said. It was not an easy month for the couple, who are living with their 2-year-old in a rented house in Santa Monica. Middle-of-the-night patch jobs on their old house were mostly in vain, as water poured in through window and door openings. Now the oak floors will have to be replaced, and the rain delays will probably mean the couple can’t move back in time for the family’s new arrival.

“I think we can forget about that,” Cathy Zanzinger said. “We’re just throwing our hands up--just live with it and change our game plan.”

For Cole, the latest storm was simply more proof that her house in the Hollywood Hills has a water hex. Previous roofing problems and bad plumbing have claimed parts of her ceiling twice before. A landscaping job once led to a flooded dining room. And a gardener once left a sprinkler on for four days while she and her husband were away. On their return, they discovered the resulting flood had caused a mudslide that poured downhill into a house rented at the time by actor Tom Cruise. She said the mishap cost her insurance company $70,000.

“My insurance company doesn’t even want to talk to me anymore. You could call it the curse of the water,” she said. “You know the artist Christo? I was thinking about commissioning him to come and wrap my house.”

Roofers now are wondering how many of those desperate callers will follow through with repairs now that good weather’s back. A lot of his firm’s fix-up estimates will end up in the files, Haskins said.

“They’ll say, ‘We decided to wait till next summer,’ ” he said. “We constantly get repeat calls every winter.”