The Knuckleheads of the Day award

Today's winners are Ken Hilzer and Robert Stein Inc. roofing company for whom he works, plus the Palm Beach County Building Division. They get today's award for the roofing work done on the home of Bill Marinaro. Unfortunately Mr. Marinaro didn't hire the roofer and now he has $20,000 to $30,000 worth of roof damage.

How did this happen? A typo on the permit application to repair a another roof sent Robert Stein's roofers to the wrong address. Both the building division and Mr. Hilzer admit to the error but that does Mr. Marinaro little good. I also love Mr. Hilzer's statement, that they don't want to make this costly for Mr. Marinaro. Hey dummy, it shouldn't cost one nickel of Marinaro's money to get his roof back.

Incompetent bungling best describes what happened here. This is not all that uncommon either. When I got a loan recenly, the company making the loan put down the wrong address on the application. I told them so but guess what? It was still wrong when I closed on the loan. More proof of bad Florida schools are, Sand is not Sana!

For raising the wrong roof, Ken Hilzer and Robert Stein Inc. roofing company for whom he works, plus the Palm Beach County Building Division are today's Knuckleheads of the day.

Open Post- Cao's Blog, Don Surber, Mudville Gazette, Third World County, Jo's Cafe, Basil's Blog, Mark My Words, Bright & Early, Right Wing Nation,

A familiar pattern repeats itself through the Rainbow Lakes neighborhood west of Boynton Beach: blue tarp, tar paper, blue tarp. The roofs here took a hit from Hurricane Wilma, and ever since, residents have pleaded with contractors to replace their barrel tiles before the next storm season.

The neighbors started calling Bill Mariano, 81, last month when they spotted workers atop his house.

How did he get the roofers to come out so quickly, they asked.

"I said, 'I don't know who they are,' " said Mariano, who moved to the neighborhood 20 years ago when he retired from a Massachusetts insurance company. "They didn't believe me, I guess because I like to make a joke once in a while."

Mariano had awoken that morning, March 3, before 8 a.m., to a terrible clatter from above. He went outside, looked up and saw more than a dozen men throwing tiles off his roof.

This would have come as a welcome sight, except that Mariano hadn't scheduled his roof for repairs. The storm caused minor damage to his roof, and the mortgage company hadn't signed and returned his insurance check.

He watched helplessly as hundreds of tiles, worth between $5 and $20 apiece, hit the ground and shattered. Some hit his brand-new air conditioner, ruining the casing.

He called the sheriff's office, which informed Mariano that the roofers had a permit for his house. The permit, it turns out, was valid. It was just for the wrong house.

"What happened is we train our people to when all else fails, check the permit," said Ken Hilzer, operations manager for the Robert Stein Inc. roofing company in Port St. Lucie. "Palm Beach County messed up. They printed it out with the wrong address on it."

The roofers were supposed to be at 5421 Helene Circle. Mariano lives at 5241 Helene Circle.

"We had shared responsibility," county building official Rebecca Caldwell said. The person who applied for the permit listed the owner's name and address as 5241, Mariano's house, but the improvement address says 5421, the correct house down the street. The permit clerk should have used the second address, Caldwell said.

"It is an unfortunate incident that proves that the contractor and the County have human beings working for them, and doing so as quickly as possible to get the community repaired from last year's storms, and prepared for the future storm season," she wrote in an e-mail. "That equates to double the normal workload for the Building Division, and I can only guess what it means for this particular roofing contractor."

Robert Stein still has 150 houses to go before hurricane season starts in two months, Hilzer said.

The time crunch means workers didn't have the luxury of carefully prying off Mariano's roof tiles and preserving them for future use, he said.

The roofers realized their mistake after the sheriff's office sent a deputy to the house. They put down a protective layer of tar paper, finally departing 12 hours after they woke Mariano. They left a bucket of tar and a box of nails on the roof, and about 15 boxes of an adhesive membrane on the lawn.

"I thought they were coming back in a couple of days," said Mariano, whose son works in the sales department of The Palm Beach Post. "They never came back."

The company is working with Mariano and his lawyer to figure out a way to pay for a new roof, which usually runs between $20,000 and $30,000, Hilzer said.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Mariano's insurance company already had issued a check for repairs.

"We're trying to get it worked out now," Hilzer said. "We're more than willing to make it not a costly event for him."

Cross Posted to Bullwinkle Blog