Russ Peissig and Roof Technology

BDS is known for architecture, planning and roof technology, but some may be wondering what exactly is roof technology??The Roof Technology Group (RTG) brings close to 30 years of experience investigating and solving roof problems across Alaska. With Alaska’s cold climate issues ranging from wet maritime conditions to dry, cold blowing snow each site has unique conditions to consider.?

Roof Technology Specialist Russ Peissig has been with BDS 14 years, and has seen his share of odd roof problems. Recently he shared with Designer Amber Harper how his path led him to being a roof specialist and some unique problems and solutions he has come across over the years.?

Amber: I wanted to talk about what you do here at BDS and how you got into that. So, do you have a story of how that all happened?

Russ: Well, I think the reason the RTG (Roof Technology Group) got going and exists is because of the nature of the weather and the outsides of buildings and how the outsides of buildings are built to resist the nature of weather here. You have a lot of stuff going on within the space of a wall between the warm indoor air and the cold outside air, and there's a lot that can go wrong and cause the building to fail.

When I started working with John Stadum in about 1995 or so at USKH, I had gotten there on my previous experience in civil and survey kind of work. I was the low guy on the totem pole in the survey group there at a point when they were hitting a slow time.?We had a staff meeting and the manager of the group, he did the look ahead, you know, what the work's looking like for the next three months, six months, whatever. He said, ‘Most of the time, it looks bad in this kind of a time window. It's hard to see that far ahead, but just letting you know that if we need to cut somebody, it's you, because you're the low guy on the totem pole. If you want to take a chance here, you're welcome to do that. I know that John Stadum upstairs is looking for some help and if you want, I'll take you up there and introduce you.’ So being a guy who hates looking for work, I decided to try that and so I met John. They were so swamped that I couldn't really get any schooling from them. I just kind of had to sit there and listen.?In the meantime, I had a bunch of civil related work that I was still doing as well sitting in the roof group.

At that time the roof group had two people. So, I was hearing the lingo and the jargon and every time I was hearing stuff that I didn't understand, I wrote it on a sheet of paper and kept the list until I could figure out what they were talking about. I did that until they had a new job where it made sense for me to jump in and help. So, then I started actually doing that work after sitting there doing civil work and listening to roofing talk for probably, I don't know how long it was, a couple of months probably.

A: So you went from the ground up really fast some could say.

R: From the ground up… yeah, from the dirt up. (laughs)

A: What's the most common problem that you've seen through your career?

R: Well, you know, with roofs, it's going to be leaks probably. And with walls and things, it can be a combination of leaks or poor detailing that causes the weather to deteriorate the building in some way. With walls you might find rotting framing and other components. Your house is probably a good example of things that happen a lot.

A: My house, yep. (laughs)

R: So determining why the roof is going bad is part of our task a lot of times, and figuring out how much life is left in the roof. You hear a lot about people doing moisture surveys, as if they're going to just fix the bad spots and leave the rest of the roof in place. But if the rest of the roof is already 30 years old, which it could easily be from our experience and from the types of clients that we've had, they're more willing to just tear off the roof and start over. Then if the problems are in the walls and things you need to try to figure out if it come from somewhere else and just ended up in the wall, or is it the wall itself that's causing the problem? So we do a lot of investigative work to determine why things aren't working.

A: Yeah, so it sounds like water is usually the culprit. It's just a matter of where it's coming in and how it’s coming in.

R: Yeah. So the water can be from outside rain, snow melt or whatever, but it also can be from the inside with humidity problems and vapor retarder issues and things like that. When Bruce was with our group, he would find things like, you get a call that the roof is leaking and he'd go look at the roof and not necessarily see anything there, so he goes underneath and looks around up in an attic space. He is looking around with the flashlight and not able to see anything that was a smoking gun, the smoking wet gun. But he managed to move just right and felt his hand go through a spray of mist and there it was – it was a plumbing problem up in the attic. A joint had come unsoldered just enough to spray out this needle thin spray of water. That itself wasn't that big a problem, but over time it became the problem that they were seeing down below. So, there can be other things causing the problems you see on the inside of the building.

A: Not just Mother Nature. Well, you've been all over in different parts of the State and being able to get up on top of roofs and look around, has there been something that stands out for you?

R: Valdez is always a really beautiful place. Well, maybe not always in some weather conditions. (laughs) Valdez can be a really beautiful place. The flight to Valdez when the weather is great, is one of the best flights – it’s so scenic. Really nice. A lot of places are interesting, and it costs you as much to go to Europe as to go to some of these villages. So, if you can do that and get paid for it, it's interesting to see some of these other places.

A: Yeah, definitely. I have yet to see Valdez on a nice day and look forward to a trip that’s not in clouds. (laughs) Well, so sometimes when people have problems and before someone like you can come in and help assess what exactly is the problem, they try to fix it themselves. Has there been a unique condition that you've discovered upon arriving that somebody tried to solve something in unique vernacular kind of way?

R: Like old metal coffee cans or plastic buckets adhered with mastic into the roof? (laughs)

A: So what's the purpose of that? What were they trying to solve?

R: It was probably a stack or something through the roof, and then they didn't need the stack anymore. It was letting cold air into the room below, so they probably stuffed the end of it with insulation and found a five gallon plastic paint bucket and tipped it upside down over the top of the stack, and then used roofing products to seal it into the roof.

A: I think I remember, was there a shirt that had gotten stuffed down a drain…?

R: Yeah. (laughs) If something is abandoned and they just want to cover it over, a t-shirt and duct tape must just work fine. (laughs)

A: For a while.

R: For a while, right. (laughs)

A: Any other stories that stick out?

R: Yeah. We had a real strange roof configuration – it had a smooth surface and a lot of vertical texture to it with sort of these folded plate roofs around a big dome in the center. We went up to investigate what was going on with it and why insulation was getting wet. Apart from age we were finding other damage, and in trying to figure out what was going on realized that some of the damage was caused by chain rings of bicycles. (laughs) We were seeing that some of the marks up there corresponded to bike tires. Kids were boosting their bikes up onto the roof and using these folded plate valleys and ridges and the dome thing as a BMX park to do tricks and stuff. So, the bikes were causing some damage to the roof membrane. I think the roof had more problems than just the bikes, but that was unusual. (laughs) In the back of the school, they could climb up on a dumpster or something and toss the bikes up on top and then boost each other up onto the roof and go to town.

A: Some innovative kids there.

R: At another school we saw marks on things and realize that kids had been up there on skateboards. It's kind of a similar thing, they would boost each other up there and use the internal parapets and other roof features as grind rails and stuff for skateboarding. (laughs)

A: Oh wow. (laughs) What about some Alaskan type things that happen??Like ravens eating on the roof, well eating the roof, not just dining al fresco, but dining on the roof itself.

R: And it was probably more than dining. It was probably entertainment because ravens, I guess, are like a four-year-old little kid, except with big sharp beaks – they’re real curious. So, in the smooth expanse of the roof, if there's a bump or a lump, they'll go to that and just sort of pick at it and peck on it and can easily pick right through EPDM rubber. The rubber membrane is similar to inner tube material and so we've seen roofs in certain places that just had hundreds of holes from ravens. We've seen some cases where maybe as a quick fix, somebody would spray urethane foam over something and then coat it with waterproofing and that's also easy to pick through. So, urethane foam would be all picked to pieces and cratered up from birds picking at it, and then the insulation gets soaked with water and doesn't work very well anymore.

A: Right. There’s your water infiltration problem. (laughs) Well, I think that’s all I got Russ. Thanks for giving us a little insight into the RTG.

R: And why people don't just flock after this kind of work. I'll never know. (laughs)