Chimney work in Pierce County, and what changes as you move across it

Tacoma is the only Pierce County city with its own page on this site so far. Read it for the city's permit path, its historic special review districts, and the wood stove rule that applies there.

Everywhere else is covered by request rather than by a page: Puyallup, Lakewood, University Place, Gig Harbor, Sumner, Bonney Lake, Steilacoom, Orting and Eatonville, plus unincorporated communities such as Parkland, Spanaway, Frederickson, South Hill, Graham and the Key Peninsula. The services are the same at all of them. What changes is the paperwork, the burn rules, and the weather.

Inside an incorporated city or town, that city permits and inspects the work. In unincorporated Pierce County, the county does. Mailing addresses are a poor guide: plenty of mail addressed to Tacoma, Puyallup or Gig Harbor lands outside those city limits.

Unincorporated addresses

Pierce County Code adopts the building, residential, mechanical and fire codes and states that they govern all buildings and structures within unincorporated Pierce County. Planning and Public Works implements them through the Building Official; the fire code is the exception, administered by the Pierce County Fire Marshal.

What the county exempts

The county rewrote the residential code's exempt-work list into 15 categories — small sheds, low fences and retaining walls, finish work, re-roofing and re-siding within limits, and similar. Masonry, chimney and fireplace repair are not among them.

Incorporated addresses

The city is the authority instead. In Tacoma that is Planning and Development Services, which exempts ordinary repairs but stops at cutting away a wall or removing a load-bearing support.

Burn bans are not a city decision here. The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency issues and enforces them across King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties, and Pierce is called differently from King.

• A lower trigger, called further ahead. Stage 1 comes when fine particles are forecast to exceed a 24-hour average of 30 micrograms per cubic meter within 72 hours in Pierce and Snohomish, against 35 within 48 hours in King and Kitsap.
• Three zones, not one county. Greater Pierce County, South Pierce, and Pierce Peninsula are called separately, and the agency says Greater Pierce County sees bans more often than the rest of the region.
• What each stage stops. Stage 1 stops wood-burning fireplaces and uncertified stoves and inserts. Stage 2 stops all wood burning, certified appliances and pellet stoves included.

Water damages more chimneys than fire does, and how often it freezes inside the masonry changes sharply as you move east and uphill. Three county stations, same 1991-2020 normals.

• Tacoma Narrows Airport, about 290 feet. 42.02 inches of precipitation a year, 21.4 nights at or below freezing, 1.2 days that never rise above it.
• McMillin Reservoir, about 570 feet, between Puyallup and Orting. 45.13 inches — barely more rain — but 59.5 freezing nights, nearly triple the shoreline figure, and 2.0 days that stay frozen.
• Longmire in Mount Rainier National Park, about 2,755 feet. 82.57 inches and 143 inches of snow, 157.3 freezing nights, and still only 12.4 days that never climb above freezing.

Pierce County's housing is younger than its reputation: across roughly 369,700 units the median construction year is 1986, and about 165,700 were built in 1990 or later. Only about 37,200 date from 1939 or earlier — and about 26,200 of those sit inside the City of Tacoma, roughly seven in ten of the county's entire pre-1940 stock.

• Not sure which applies. A chimney inspection settles whether you are looking at a sweep, a liner, water repairs, or masonry work, and a written scope is built from it.
• Then read the city page. Tacoma has its own. Anywhere else in the county, request an inspection and say which side of the city line your address sits on.