A $476,000 bid by Carter-Melence, Inc., accepted by the East Hampton Village Board at their Dec. 15 meeting, allowed construction to begin this week on broken roof trusses at the Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street, where the village has held its public meetings since the 1980s. It was the lowest of the three bids the board had received.
At the same meeting, the board approved a $68,000 bid from BK Builders to renovate the front lobby of the building. Dave Collins, the superintendent of public works and facilities manager for the village, said work should be complete by March 17.
The village discovered the truss failure by chance last April, when Ken Collum, a fire marshal, entered the attic to investigate a leak in the room. He located a drip coming from a condensation line attached to an air handler, but he also noticed the cracked trusses.
“They’re making some progress working on one of the first trusses,” said Mr. Collins. He said the ceiling, which they estimated was sagging about four inches, had already been raised by about two.
“This is an important job for us to make sure we get right. We’re just shy of half a million dollars. That’s a lot of taxpayer money. Also, from a safety standpoint, this is our public meeting place. We have a lot of eyes on the project,” he said. Apart from Mr. Collins and Mr. Collum, Tom Preiato, the village building inspector, and East Hampton Village’s engineer, Vincent Gaudiello of the Raynor Group, will keep watch. Further, Craft Engineering, the company that first assessed the damage last April and designed the repair, has been hired as a “clerk of the works” for $4,000.
The trusses are made of wood, and span about 54 feet, from the front to the back of the building, which was built in 1961 and 1962. “They don’t do construction like this anymore for a reason,” said Mr. Collins. “It’s all steel truss now.” He said the failure could not be pinned on a single cause, but on an accumulation of factors.
“We’ve done a number of renovations, each with engineers, and they all felt the trusses were adequate, but in the long run, they weren’t,” Mr. Collins said. A variety of things added weight that could have stressed the trusses to the point of failure: skylights, air-conditioning and ductwork, solar panels, and, finally, the addition of plywood, which allowed the fire department and Village to store items (“All attics start collecting stuff,” he said).
Mr. Preiato said the original wood trusses would remain in place, but be supported on each side by steel frames, and bolted at every connection with steel plates. “We don’t anticipate any delays,” he said. “There’s always the unforeseen, but, frankly, it’s already gone a little longer than we had hoped. It’s a well-used building.” Last April he hoped that the village would be back in the building in a matter of weeks. Instead, all public meetings since have been held at LTV Studios in Wainscott.
“Fire Department meetings were always held up there. In the mid-1980s when the Police Department was put in, an elevator was installed. That’s when the village board decided that the space was A.D.A.-accessible and a larger, better space to hold their meetings,” said Mr. Collins. “It was a much smaller building when it was built compared to what it is now.”
