Like it never happened...
Returning to Naples after a short summer holiday in Belfast, we encountered a series of mysteries in our apartment.
At first, there were small things like furniture that had been moved a few feet down along a wall. Then came surprises like table lamps plugged into the wrong socket so that they didn’t come on when the wall switch was thrown. We found the extension cord no longer reached between the lamps at opposite ends of the red couch. And then came a big one: all the plugs in our TV cabinet had been detached and left dangling. “A Poltergeist Electrician” perhaps?
That evening, we went to dinner and as we encountered neighbors in the hallways and restaurant, the mystery rapidly deepened. Several folks simply sympathized with us about the “big leak” in our apartment. Others were more specific about having watched through our front door, propped open with ventilation fans, as teams moved all our furniture out of our front hall, dining room, living room and study and stacked it in the two end bedrooms.
So we now had eye-witness accounts of our ceiling being partly torn down, several walls being opened up almost completely and large sections of our floor being ripped up. It was a big surprise to everyone here in Siena Lakes Management that nobody had even contacted us in Maine. They take great pride in keeping residents informed and were deeply embarrassed to have missed that step in their protocol. We knew nothing.
Below is a photo of our living room ceiling the day the leak was first discovered by the cleaning staff. The camera’s light is focused on the seam in the ceiling where the first slow drips had appeared. You can see the ceiling board is very wet and sagging because the taped joints are visible and are starting to fail.
Next step was to tear off the ceiling material to search for answers. Clearly visible are a surface-mounted AC outlet box and a ceiling-mounted smoke detector (with red tape). The bright object below it is a small piece of ceiling board that is still being held by a mounting screw. Looking at the image above, with our wall and ceiling material removed, there is an excellent view of exactly what the architect’s renderings and the construction drawings had already told them. There was no normal way for water to leak from that ceiling space. There were no water sources, no AC drains, no heating/cooling pipes, no pipes at all.
When examination of the space above our ceiling didn’t provide any new evidence, they concluded the mystery leak must be coming from the apartment directly above us. But there was no evidence at all of water damage there. We understand they even cut holes in the “Attic” above that apartment to inspect for possible roof leaks that might be finding some sneaky path into our ceiling. No possible pathway for water was found. The mystery deepened still further.
But before we go on… here are a few things you need to know about “Pre-Stressed, Hollow-Core, Reinforced-Concrete, Ceiling Beams.”
They are very common in modern commercial construction. Six feet wide and thirty feet long, they have six hollow cores running through them to make them lighter and fourteen steel reinforcing bars to make them strong.
Here is what one looked like as it was being lowered into place at Siena Lakes, just about where our second-floor ceiling is located.
Back to our mystery… with all the water-logged ceiling board removed, they now focused on the long, dark, wet stain on the ceiling. It appeared water had been slowly seeping from the lower surface of the ceiling beam directly under one of its internal hollow spaces (seen in the image above). These hollows are about a foot square and thirty feet long.
They can (and did) hold a lot of water.
With the mystery finally solved, Siena Lakes engaged ServePro to take the next step.
They drilled 1/4 inch drain holes into the water-stained part of the beam where the drips were coming from. The slow dripping turned in a shower of water flowing out the hollow in the beam.
All told, they drained 30+ gallons of water into large red buckets before the hollow beam was deemed empty. This took several days with noisy ventilation fans running 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, ServePro drilled dozens of dry test holes in other parts of the leaking beam and in adjacent beams to be sure it was a single-point-accident that allowed the water to accumulate inside this particular beam’s hollow space in the first place. The rest of the hollow spaces were all dry.
There was a lot of explaining to do.
The next morning, three levels of management came to visit and helped us piece together this story. Our routine cleaning service gal had entered while we were gone and found a slow but steady dripping from the center of the living room ceiling. Closer inspection revealed that the whole ceiling was completely saturated with water, hanging down from the rafters and threatening to fall in. Water had migrated to the walls, wetting the wallboard in several places. they called in the contractor who built the place and the architects and (most helpfully) ServePro, Inc. whose lively TV ads for accident damage remediation you see on TV every night telling the world they can “Make it Like it Never Happened.”
Well, they come close.
So, how did the water get into our beam?
My working theory is that when stacks upon stacks of floor beams were delivered to the Siena Lakes building site, one hollow cell was punctured (run into by a forklift for example) and slowly filled with many gallons of rainwater. After a few years, water began to seep out, slowly at first, then starting to drip and eventually damaging our ceiling enough to be noticed. As to the damaged floor. It was probably just an undesirable side effect of Servpro’s remediation efforts that surprised them by allowing 30+ gallons to gush out all at once. Spillage from this is what damaged our flooring, which is not waterproof. It was necessary to replace any and all wet flooring to prevent future hidden mold growth.
Editor’s note: I think for now we can file this one under “All’s Well That Ends Well” … Phew.
