Problems are through the roof

Experts call for urgent adjustments to the roof repair program. Otherwise, they warn, the coming winter will bring no less problems than the previous ones.

It was assumed that repairs would be carried out on the roofs of 9 thousand houses. At the same time, 7 thousand roofs had to be repaired by management companies at the expense of payments from the population.
“There is no one to monitor the quality of work,” says Sergei Malkov, deputy chairman of the Legislative Assembly’s commission on urban services. — For example, in the technical department of the State Administration for Civil Aviation of the Kalininsky district there are only seven specialists, in the Admiralteysky district there are six.
The head of the technical department of the Housing Committee, Irina Rodionova, agrees that technical supervision is a weak point. With such a volume of repairs, it is impossible to check every roof with our specialists, she says. This summer, district administrations were recommended to involve independent experts in their work.
“Only the administration of the Petrograd district responded,” says Pavel Stepanov, chairman of the roofers’ trade union. — Inspections revealed a lot of violations. We had to go to the same roof three or four times to force the contractor to fix the defect. At one site, when we came for the fourth time, it turned out that the contractor had abandoned the work, and the new coating was already swelling with bubbles. There are houses where all our instructions are simply ignored... The work must be completed by winter - will the contractors have time to complete it if serious alterations are required? To date, out of the 55 houses that we supervise, only two are prepared for delivery.
“One team of professionals can do a major overhaul of three or four roofs in a season. That is, the capital repair program alone requires about 900 roofers. And taking into account current repairs, about 2 thousand are required. But there are not such a number of specialists in the city,” says Alexander Datchenko, chairman of the national roofing union.
As follows from the response of now ex-vice-governor Sergeev to Malkov’s deputy request, for the entire 2011 it was planned to train... 65 roofers. However, now the plans have changed.
— Roofers can be attracted from nearby regions, but for this it is necessary to provide people with normal living conditions. The program for the construction of apartment buildings is aimed at this, explains Rodionova. — The second way is training. Currently, 1,500 roofers are being recruited for training courses to improve their skills.
— Advanced training is great, but these people, as you correctly noted, are ALREADY working. We spoke with migrant workers who work on St. Petersburg roofs. As far as we understood them, practically none of them had worked on roofs before,” Stepanov answers her.
— The minimum set of tools for a team of roofers costs 30–50 thousand rubles. It is clear that no one will give such tools to those who work on roofs today. And they work with unknown means - this also greatly affects the quality.
“With the quality of work that we saw this summer, problems with roofs will not be solved. Moreover, in a number of houses the situation after renovation will be worse than before,” Malkov sums up. — In the coming days we will send our proposals for adjusting the program to Smolny. In the time remaining before winter, certain steps can still be taken.

Victoria RABOTNOVA
Photo by Mikhail Maslennikov