Jaclyn Houser and her husband Jason visited their storage space on H Street NE only to walk in on a nightmare. Along with their belongings, standing water filled their third-floor unit at H Street Storage, on H Street between 6th and 7th Streets NE. Wood furniture, a mattress, art and other keepsakes were all soaked, stained, and ruined by a half-inch of accumulated rain. By the looks of things, Jaclyn Houser says, theirs wasn’t the only unit that got drenched.

Jason Houser dropped by his H Street Storage unit on Saturday, May 22. Almost a week earlier — on Monday and Tuesday of that week — a downpour soaked through the roof and into units throughout the building’s third, fourth, and fifth floors, according to officials from the corporate office of Mid-Atlantic Partners & Self-Storage, Inc., the owners of H Street Storage.

The owners of H Street Storage acknowledge that the roof was in bad shape — and has been for more than a decade. But that doesn’t make them liable for any damage, they say. H Street Storage says the fault belongs to a contractor brought in to fix the roof — and to the renters themselves.

“We had a lot of water come in,” explains Rick Moran, a co-owner of H Street Storage. “When you don’t have a roof membrane in, that’s what happens.”