Chimney service in Fauntleroy, Seattle

Fauntleroy's waterfront has been armored for ninety years. Federal relief crews of the 1930s (WPA, CWA and CCC) cleared Lincoln Park and built its trails and seawalls, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society records, and Seattle Parks today counts about a mile of seawall and rocky beach below the park's bluff. The Colman family added the saltwater pool at Point Williams in 1941.

Uphill, the ground is less settled. The Seattle Landslide Study logs 21 landslides since 1955 in its 47th Avenue SW area, a steep slope facing west-southwest around Maplewood Place SW, and notes that the city built retaining structures and drainage there after the storms of 1996-97. For land south of Lincoln Park that Seattle annexed only in the 1950s, the study cautions that older instability is simply missing from city files. It also explains the mechanism common to West Seattle's hills: sand lying over clay, with springs emerging where the two meet.

For chimney work this translates into three habits. We treat the water-facing side of a stack as the worn side until shown otherwise. We check plumb, because a chimney is rigid and reveals ground movement early. And we plan access before quoting, since the low side of a hillside house may put the flue top a full story higher than it looks from the street.

West Seattle has puzzled seismologists since 1965, because its chimneys fall in earthquakes that leave nearer districts alone. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program publishes a simulation that offers an explanation: some 300 meters underground, a buckle in the bedrock about 200 meters wide gathers seismic waves coming up from the south and focuses them. The zone of amplification in the model broadly matches where chimney damage was reported in 1965 and again in 2001.

The Seattle Landslide Study supplies the setting. It places the peninsula south of the Seattle Fault, a reverse fault running east-west, which is why bedrock sits closer to the surface here than north of it. And the city's 2017 report on unreinforced masonry observes that Seattle is the only American city whose brick buildings were damaged by three separate earthquakes inside 73 years.

No source here maps the effect down to individual blocks, so we make no claim about whether Fauntleroy lies in the zone. The practical conclusion is modest: an older brick chimney anywhere on this peninsula deserves a look after any earthquake strong enough to be felt, including at the levels you cannot see from the ground.

Wood smoke in Fauntleroy answers to a regional regulator covering four counties, the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency; it calls the air quality bans and polices them itself. Most of its bans fall between autumn and late winter, in cold, windless spells that leave smoke hanging low. The fire marshal handles the separate summer bans aimed at fire danger.

There are two stages. Under Stage 1, wood fireplaces must stay dark, and so must any wood stove or insert without certification. Stage 2 adds the certified ones and pellet stoves. Exemptions exist only for homes the agency has cleared ahead of time as lacking adequate heat, and the bar is high: if the house can be kept at 70 degrees at a height of three feet, it has adequate heat. High running costs do not count.

Two rules apply every day of the year. Any day of the year, a plume from your chimney has to stay below 20 percent opacity, judged over a six-minute window each hour. While a ban is on, the standard drops to nothing visible, and that applies to exempt households too. Clean, dry-burning fires and a flue in good order are how a household stays inside the first rule; the agency's ban status page is how it learns about the second.