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McDonald’s isn’t just bad for your gut, it’s bad for your buildings gutters too!
We recently attended to one of our clients, who operate multinational locations, to carry out a routine gutter cleaning and gutter maintenance service. However, this routine gutter maintenance turned out to be a much bigger job than we anticipated!
What we found
As you can see from the photo above, there was a sapling growing in the gutters, which had managed to grow so strong that we needed a saw to be able to remove the root.
However, removing plants from gutters is just another routine activity in life of a gutter cleaner. What we did not anticipate was the unusual presence of a significant amount of McDonald’s packaging. Both our client and our gutter maintenance specialist could not determine how the fast food wrapping got into the guttering.
We began our routine gutter cleaning, which resulted in 8 bags full bags of rubbish, collected from the gutters – two of which were filled with just McDonalds sauce cartons! Not only did we discover the haul of sauce cartons, when we began investigating into why the drains were severely blocked, we found one clogged with a McDonald’s drink cup.
Gutter maintenance
To ensure these blockages won’t arise again we installed a rubber drain grill over the top of the gutter, as the original was missing.
As you can see the gully pot was also damaged and needed a drainage company to replace the cover. The outlet/downpipe is shared with the gutter from the neighbouring company, and we soon realised tape had obviously been applied to stop any leaks, so it must have been broken for some time.
We soon realised that many of the buildings within the retail park needed routine gutter cleaning, otherwise, debris would continue to cause damage to the buildings. We discovered guttering that was corroded, and a leaking joint, luckily we managed to seal this, but it proved quite difficult as the run was so full of water. However, without routine gutter maintenance, we suspect several more will experience leaks and damaged gutters unless attended to.
This retail park gets very busy early in the day and the time to required to seal all the joints would exceed the small slot available. This would mean, for public safety, the area would need to be scaffolded to undertake work that would take a substantial amount of time.