Built-Up Roof Systems

Atlanta's downtown and inner-suburb commercial building stock carries more built-up roofing than any other system type in the older inventory. We assess BUR systems for remaining service life, perform targeted repairs, and scope recover and replacement projects against current Georgia energy code and manufacturer warranty paths.

Built-up roofing - multi-ply asphalt and felt, typically gravel-surfaced - was the commercial roofing standard in Atlanta from the 1950s through the early 1980s. Atlanta's growth as a commercial center in the postwar decades produced an enormous inventory of BUR systems on downtown office towers, inner-suburb retail strips, industrial buildings in the Marietta corridor and the southwest industrial ring, and institutional facilities across DeKalb, Fulton, and Cobb Counties. Much of this inventory is still in service - and much of it is significantly past the design life of the original system.

The assessment question for every Atlanta BUR system we walk is the same: is this roof repairable, recoverable, or past the point where anything short of full replacement is defensible? Atlanta's climate makes that question harder to answer from a visual inspection alone. The high-humidity environment means insulation saturation can be extensive on a roof that looks visually intact from the gravel surface. The metro's high-intensity thunderstorms create ponding conditions that accelerate BUR insulation saturation through minor seam failures. And the Piedmont geological movement that characterizes Atlanta's building stock creates ongoing stress at parapet flashings and building joints that produces new failure points faster than periodic repair can address them.

I do not recommend recovering or recoating BUR systems without pulling moisture cores. The number of Atlanta building owners who have recovered or coated wet BUR systems - spending significant capital on a roof that failed within five years - is large. The core pull costs a small fraction of any project and is the only way to produce a defensible scope recommendation on a BUR system with any significant age.

Downtown Atlanta - the Peachtree Street corridor from Five Points south through the Castleberry Hill and Vine City corridors, the West End commercial district, and the Sweet Auburn business corridor - carries a dense concentration of 1950s through 1970s commercial buildings on original or first-recover BUR systems. Many of these buildings have been through one coating application or modified bitumen recover; many have not been touched in decades. This is the highest-density BUR replacement market in the metro, and it is being driven by the current wave of downtown and near-downtown redevelopment and adaptive reuse projects.

The inner-suburb office and industrial corridors - Decatur's commercial core, the East Atlanta Village retail strip, the Hapeville and College Park industrial zone adjacent to Hartsfield-Jackson - carry another large BUR inventory from the same era, often on larger-footprint single-story industrial buildings where the BUR system spans 50,000 to 200,000 square feet. These buildings typically have multiple prior coating or recover applications layered over the original BUR, and the total dead-load of that layered system is often a factor in the replacement scope - some buildings need a full tear-off before the new system can be installed within structural dead-load limits.

Fulton County school facilities and the DeKalb County school system both carry significant BUR inventories on school buildings constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. Public-sector roofing in Georgia follows specific procurement requirements - projects above certain dollar thresholds require competitive bid with Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission procurement compliance. We are familiar with the bid documentation format these projects require.