The past week at ESA was a full one and I wanted to give you some information specifically about facility issues we encountered.
Last weekend’s very cold weather proved a problem for many schools and, sadly, we were not exempt. One of the boilers gave out and the other one did not fire up. Usually, an alarm would have gone off at a central station to indicate that the school was going into very low temperatures, but that too failed for some reason. The result was a couple of frozen pipes, with one in the kitchen area bursting. The other frozen pipe, in Room 100, did not burst, but it did mean we could not put heat on in that space. In the afternoon, when the water began to flow, the main water source was turned off and we were without water for about 25 minutes. As soon as that happened, we entered into communication with the Board about closing early; we were able to turn the water back on before this decision had to be made. On Tuesday, it took the whole day to warm the school up; the boilers are continuing to have some issues but reps from the manufacturer were in Tuesday, Wednesday and again today. Most rooms were back to normal today (Thursday).
Our next facility issue was related to smells coming from the replacement of our roof. I sent out notes earlier about this and we knew that there would be some smells; both Tuesday and Wednesday, however, had particular problems and we had to move students in the dance wing to other teaching spaces. On Tuesday, the intake vents were not all turned off and some strong smells got into the north end of the school. We have charcoal fans and they were running, but not well enough to get all smells out. Staff now understand that all intake vents must be turned off whenever work is being done on the roof. On Wednesday, the smell continued (though not as bad) and I’ve ordered a carpenter to work on some air gaps on the back doors (ingress for smells). I’m hoping this is going to take care of it and will monitor the situation.
As always, please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions. My apologies for not writing on Tuesday when we were first dealing with these issues.