RUMFORD — A year after the roof of Mountain Valley High School began leaking, forcing sports teams and clubs to relocate for several months, things have returned to normal, Principal Matt Gilbert said Wednesday afternoon.
However, the building and grounds crew for Regional School Unit 10 and Mountain Valley High School are still cautious about snow accumulation on the roof.
“Right now, everything is holding up well,” Gilbert said. “We put a new roof on the auditorium, and the rest of the school’s roof was sealed up. We aren’t anticipating any problems with the recent snowstorms we’ve had, but it’s always worth keeping an eye on.”
Gilbert said the problem “isn’t so much the snow load,” but instead, creating good access to the roof drains when the snow begins melting.
“When we really need to start worrying is when the weather heats up,” Gilbert said. “The building and grounds crew are going to make sure that there is good access to the roof drains that bring the melting snow to the appropriate storm drains.
“Right now, it’s not recommended for us to go up there with the snowblowers or the snow removal team, because we just put a new surface up there,” Gilbert said. “At the same time, we need to make sure we know where all the drains are, and make sure that there’s proper access.”
The school roof was installed in 1984 and was leaking shortly after it was built.
Kenny Robbins, RSU 10 buildings, grounds and transportation director, said after the 2014 leaks that the high school roof had been patched several times, but the extreme weather resulted in substantially more leaks.
The damage estimate, about $78,000, was referred to the district’s insurance company.
Robbins said, “Everyone is holding their breath.”
“What we did this summer was seal up all the leaks, and those seals should be good for three or four years,” he said. “Those seals should buy us a little time until we can get the money to replace the entire roof.”
RSU 10 Superintendent Craig King estimated during a 2014 meeting that the cost of replacing the school’s roof may be “more than a million dollars.”
Robbins reiterated Gilbert’s recommendation that the building and grounds crew stay off of the roof with snowblowers and snow removal equipment.
“Boy, you risk damaging the roof when you do shoveling like that,” Robbins said. “Unfortunately, we’re having the same sort of winter we had last year, where we had a lot of rain, and then a lot of snow on top of that. The best thing we can do is keep an eye on the roof drains so that when the ice and snow start to melt, we can make sure it’s getting off of the roof.”
Robbins added that the wind accompanying the snowstorms has been beneficial, because it “blows a lot of the surface snow off of the roof.”
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