“Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign, as we are entering a patch of slight turbulence,” the flight attendant on my late-night flight home from LaGuardia in New York said.
The ride got a little bumpy while flying over Kansas’ rigid grid of fields and tracts of land. My water, in it’s flimsy, shallow cup, rippled slightly, a few bags shifted around in the overhead bins, someone had to hold on to the seat backs as they proceeded to the bathroom. I never would have imagined that, at this very time on June 16, the mild and completely normal winds I was experiencing thousands of feet in the air would also rip a part of the roof off a school.
Out of concern and curiosity I turned to Instagram and Twitter to see what my friends might know, but after finding nothing, I had to wait one night to see what had happened. The morning paper on my front steps confirmed that the pool’s roof had been dismantled by the winds from a severe thunderstorm. But nothing more.
Looking further into this matter, I found that the National Weather Service reported winds on the night of the storm, at the location of the pool, to have a maximum wind speed of 49 miles per hour.
Trying to understand just what that meant, I likened it to the moderate speed at which any car might go. But to truly grasp what 49 mph of wind is, I looked to the tried-and-true wind scale of Francis Beaufort, a famous hydrograph, whose scale classified the same winds from June 16 as only a strong breeze. Perhaps strong breezes normally crumble buildings.
They don’t. In fact, the Johnson County Building Officials, a branch of the county government, issued a building code stating that all garage doors and their frames must be able to withstand a wind load associated with 90 mph winds. In other words, perhaps that flimsiest part of any house, a thin sheet of metal is required to withstand more wind force than a $61,605,000 building.
So this raised too many questions in my mind. Why would our building not be able to withstand the winds of not a tornado, but an ordinary thunders
torm? Who does the responsibility rest upon? Why didn’t this happen to any other large buildings in South Johnson County?
If the truth is that Southwest is really a flimsy structure, being defeated by wind after only four years since its birth, then perhaps the architects are to blame. Local architecture firms HTK Architects, with team leader Burke Kitchen, collaborated with NSP Architects, as well as Chicago firm Perkins+Will, and contracted to Crossland Construction. All these groups put out similar statements about the building of Southwest.
“We bring established relationships with consultants allowing us to team with building owners and users to maximize the benefits of efficient energy and water consumption, the appropriate use of natural and recycled materials and most importantly, creating healthy work, educational and living environments that support and enhance the users experience,” NSP Architects said as their official statement.
With all groups so focused on clean building and use of a space, our “green school”, a Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Project, I thought it possible that sustainability was overlooked. Crossland Construction mentioned the need to streamline the work process to enhance efficiency and minimize costs to taxpayers’ pockets, as well as to the environment.
However, Executive Director of Facilities and Operations Dave Hill seemed confident that the failure was only a result of extremely high winds associated with a storm event. He also added that the roof was being repaired back to its original plans and specifications and would be ready and functioning at full strength on the first day of school.
“An insurance company would classify this as an act of God,” Hill said. “The roof itself did not collapse. A storm involving high winds resulted in a membrane failure. This is a membrane roof, comprised of heavy rubber sheets. The roof’s membrane and a portion of underlying insulation was torn off approximately 70 percent of the natatorium.”
Despite my initial assumption that the entire roof was, in fact, unhinged by stormy winds, I still wondered why any part of our supposedly-sustainable building would detach itself. Unless these winds were true anomalies.
Then again, Blue Valley West, a building less than four miles away from our school on a hill, had nearly the same architect and contracting team as us, and is the second youngest school in the district. It was unscathed by the thunderstorms on June 16, as was the Center for Advanced Professional Studies, a building just as young as ours, covered almost entirely in glass, and once again made by a similar arrangement of the four building firms.
Hopefully our district’s authorities, higher-ups, can recognize the formula that created a more costly fix than they had ever imagined because bonds for a new middle school that feeds into Southwest will be proposed in the coming years. Maybe, just maybe, history won’t be repeated.
