Built-Up Roofing - Assessment, Recover, and Replacement

Built-up roofing - alternating layers of bitumen and reinforcing felt or ply sheet, topped with a gravel or mineral surface cap - was the dominant commercial flat roofing system installed in San Antonio from the 1950s through the early 1990s. The buildings that carried those original BUR systems are in late-cycle or past-life condition now. They are concentrated in the downtown Riverwalk hotel corridor, across the South Texas Medical Center campus buildings on Fredericksburg Road that predate the modern Methodist and Baptist Health System hospital construction, and throughout the older retail and light industrial inventory on the IH-35 North and South corridors.

We work BUR in two modes. The first is honest assessment: we walk the roof, pull core cuts at representative locations, document blister patterns and alligatoring, and tell the owner whether the BUR is genuinely end-of-life or whether targeted repairs plus a coating or recover system can extend it cost-effectively. The second mode is replacement: when the BUR has failed or is too degraded to recover, we tear it off, document the deck condition beneath, and replace it with the system that fits the building's capital horizon - typically TPO, modified bitumen, or on occasion silicone-coated BUR where the owner has a specific reason for continuity.

San Antonio's climate accelerates BUR aging in a way that milder markets do not see. Surface temperatures on dark gravel BUR membranes routinely exceed 165°F in July and August - that sustained thermal load softens and oxidizes surface bitumen faster than in the city's original BUR design assumptions from the 1960s and 1970s. We account for this in our remaining-life estimates: a 25-year-old BUR in San Antonio may have less remaining useful life than the same-age system in a cooler climate.