If the roof leak can be reported Monday thru Friday, 7:00 AM to 3:30 PM, call the on-site office at 714 529 5019. If the leak can only be reported during other times, you may leave a message with address and phone number.  A workman will likely have to respond to your home when you are available to show them from the inside just where the roof is leaking.  Then the association will repair or cover your roof.  Or, if the leak occurs on a weekend or holiday and rains are expected to continue, you can call a roofing company from the yellow pages to cover your wood roof.  (Never Permit Anyone To Do Any Roofing Work on Your Roof — Ever [except for covering in an emergency])  Even if the leak occurs when the office is closed, please leave a message and inform us of the: property address, return phone number and include area code.  The association will reimburse you for a maximum of up to $150 out-of-pocket expense for covering your roof.

Flat Roofs usually cannot be successfully covered to stop water leakage, especially on the flat roofs that are contiguous with neighbor’s roofs and or that terminate into a vertical 2nd story wall.  Only freestanding or isolated flat roofs can be successfully covered to stop leaks 100% of the time!  Follow the above Wood Roof procedure.

Wood Roofs can most often be covered to stop water leakage, except those that intersect on an angle with an adjacent flat roof.

If water appears on your flat ceilings and the wet mark grows very large and continues growing, you may want to poke a hole in the drywall with an ice pick or philips-tipped screwdriver in the middle of the wet area. Place a bucket below the hole to permit the water to drain into. This will lessen the damage to your ceiling and will keep the size of the wet mark and subsequent stain smaller. The hole in the ceiling can be easily filled once the leak is located and repaired or the roof is replaced. 

Additional important information on roofing.

Wood roofs can be torn off and replaced during most weather conditions, except actual rain and or blustery winds. This is because of the ability to quickly cover a wood roof should poor weather conditions appear suddenly during roof work.

Flat roofs often present a litany of problems and can only be replaced during the best weather conditions.  Additionally, they must be permitted to dry before they are torn off down to the plywood, and depending on the size of the flat roof and the prevailing weather conditions, this can take several days or more.  Also, there can be no wind during flat roof replacement operations due to the chilling effect wind has on the hot roofing asphalt. Roofing asphalt cannot be applied below an optimum temperature or it will lose much of its bond and adhesiveness. The roofing asphalt is heated to 550 degrees and then pumped up a metal pipe into a metal bucket on the roof before it is hot-mopped on by the roofers. Even this activity tends to cool the material some. However, cool winds can wreak havoc!

A large flat roof can take up to three full days to remove and replace in addition to the time required to dry.  Large contiguous roofs on a four-plex, or six-plex building can take a week or more to complete. For those roofs, not only must they be dry, there must be a clear weather window of opportunity to begin and complete the job without the threat of wind or rain for the period required to complete the job.  During the past 16 years of roofing operations, the association has not made a major judgment error in this area and has thus avoided the huge liability that could arise if rains came during a FLAT roof teardown or before the roof could be sealed.

Roofing Priorities

If you read and understood the nature and problems concerning flat and wood roof replacements and leak prevention issues, you will easily understand why flat roof replacements take a priority over wood roofs no matter when they were reported. Otherwise, roof replacements are performed in the order they were reported to the office and verified.