In January 2013, Virginia-based Lauren Manufacturing’s building caught fire during a standard patch to the building’s roof.

The fire occurred on Tuesday, January 29, when a crew attempted to patch a large leak over the factory’s large rubber extruder, and a spark from the machinery used to heat the asphalt dropped through the hole and caught fire to the insulation, spreading horizontally across the metal deck.  Eye witnesses stated that black billows of smoke were seen coming from the roof of the building.

Firefighters were able to squelch the blaze, but only after removing a portion of the building’s metal deck.

Initially, Lauren had cancelled the first shift to allow crews to patch the leak, but they were forced cancel the second as well while the fire still blazed.

Now, the above story is one of the worst possible scenarios to image for how a standard patch could go horribly wrong.  But these kinds of stories do happen, and they result in a loss of time and money for both the contractor and the building owner, regardless of the severity.

Outdated techniques like asphalt roofing are an accident waiting to happen.  It’s surprising that more fires haven’t been started from heating tar on top of a building to boiling and spreading it on over the roof.  Simple human errors (or even freak accidents) can lead to damages that have to be paid for and can bring a work schedule to a grinding, indefinite halt.

Tearing off the roof and just starting with a substance less accident prone is one solution, but that’s extremely expensive and requires days to weeks of facility downtime, depending on the size of the roof.

So, in lieu of wasting time and money, building owners and contractors can take advantage of our fluid-applied roof system to alleviate the risk and liability associated with older roofing methods, without the building owner incurring the massive expense of tear-off and disposal.  Since NovaTuff requires no heating or special equipment to install, there’s no risk of fire, lowering an installer’s liability.

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