ATHOL — Memorial Hall at Athol’s town hall has been closed to the public for several weeks as workers replace part of – and refinish all of – the hall’s wood floor. The project was not one that Building Superintendent John Duguay Jr. had planned on tackling when he assumed his job in October.
“The renovations are being done because we sort of had to,” said Duguay. “We had a steam pipe break in February on the west side of Liberty Hall. A register steam pipe broke on the weekend and (the steam) started to buckle the floors and ruin the plaster. It did some serious damage. Steam is nasty. It permeates everything. It started in Liberty Hall on the basement level and it rode up the wall in between the floors and buckled the floors fiercely upstairs.”
As a result, the 5,805 square foot floor of the hall is being resurfaced and 750 board feet being replaced.
“I think the leak started slowly,” he said. “I think there was a leak there for a while because there was a lot of cupping of the boards before it just let loose.”
Duguay said the damage to Liberty Hall was minimal “because the break was above the floor, so the steam rose up and went between the floors. So, it really wasn’t bad at all. The biggest thing we had to do was to open the wall to work in the pipe.”
The weekend of the break, Duguay said, temperatures got down to about 6 degrees, thus prompting the building’s heating system to work harder to keep the structure warm.
“We’re approaching 100 years here,” he explained, “and the pipe was at the lowest point of our system, so it’s really close the ground, and an end-cap rotted through. We have a one-zone system, which was recently upgraded, but, still, it operates off of one set temp. So, when it’s cold it’s running most of the time because the building is old.”
Duguay said the town’s insurance is paying most of the cost of the flooring work, estimated at around $40,000. The town’s deductible is somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800. The work is being done by A. Dion & Son Floor Contractors of Hadley. Much work unrelated to the pipe break has also been done recently.
“On the east side of the room, there was office space and storage space,” said Duguay. “I think that was put in about 35 years ago. We decided to remove that due the fact we were doing such a large floor job and the community wanted it gone anyway. So, the floor is wide open now.”
“It wasn’t part of the damage,” he continued, “but that put it on the fast track. I didn’t think that work would be done for years but because we wanted to do the whole floor it was foolish for us not to do that.”
“We’re also relocating employee mailboxes and the copiers,” he added. “We’re getting rid of everything that really doesn’t belong in the hall.”
Duguay said Liberty Hall was recently re-painted at a cost of about $1,000. He said the re-painting of Memorial Hall will likely cost a bit more because it will require scaffolding to complete the job.
“We could be looking at $6,000 or $8,000,” he said.
Work on the floor should be completed just in time for the Athol’s annual town meeting June 10.