Roof Management

Probably no other single construction feature of a building is so often taken for granted as its roofing system. Conversely, there is probably no other aspect of real property ownership that can be so urgently demanding of attention and concern than the roof.

The impact of roof serviceability on a building is of such importance, few building managers hesitate to respond promptly to a reported roof leak. Therein lies the beginning of what can be a most unpredictable and expensive building maintenance problem.

The act of simply stopping a leak, if not properly executed, will create a more costly and depreciating situation than the leak itself. Repairing obvious defects may alleviate the nuisance of leaks, but it will not preclude leaks from recurring. In addition, this approach seldom enhances the serviceability of a roofing system. The frustration from recurring nuisance leaks, or failure to find the leak sources, often results in costly and unwarranted general roofing treatment.

Reactive maintenance measures are often initiated without benefit or direction of the technical "know-how" required to achieve a quality repair. A quality repair would in turn provide continuing long-term performance of the roof being repaired. The probabilities of attaining satisfactory roof performance, as a result of repeated repairs, diminish as the frequency or area of roof repairs increase.

Frequently, the necessity to reroof is simply the consequence of either unsuccessful or over-extended roof maintenance, rather than the result of a catastrophic, premature failure of a roofing system that was originally incorrectly designed or specified, or poorly constructed. In the latter, faulty elements in design need modification. Incompatible or inferior components and materials need replacement and inadequacies in workmanship must be eliminated.

An appropriately designed and constructed built-up roofing system has an intrinsic reliability of at least a 20-year life. If 20 years of trouble-free service were attained, the economic rate of roof depreciation, discounting the cost of money, would be 5 percent annually. However, the state of the art in the roofing industry has been such that, realistically, the mean time of failure of many roofs has been 12 years or less; a depreciation rate of 8 percent.

This rate results in a 60 percent higher life cycle cost than it should be, and does not include the time and money that will probably be spent on the extraordinary maintenance usually needed just to stop leaks.

The objectives of roof management are to reduce the life cycle costs and minimize the problems of roof maintenance. Successful roof management also serves to increase the level of quality assurance to establish predictable and controllable costs inherent to roof ownership.