HAPPY TO HELP
Engineering regiment proud of what it has accomplished on P.E.I.
Anyone familiar with the basement level of the Summerside Boys and Girls Club will be in for a surprise at their next visit.
What was once a dated maze of rooms and corridors has been gutted and is in the process of being rebuilt.
The project is the result of a lot of work by local contractors and the soldiers of the Canadian Army’s 4 Engineer Support Regiment.
The army unit had been based in Slemon Park for about three weeks this month. Its 500 members were conducting Exercise NIHILO SAPPER 2018, which involved building infrastructure for community groups. The Summerside Boys and Girls club renovation was the largest of those projects.
Lt.-Col. Jason Gale, the regimental commanding officer, toured the club last week. The entire exercise was a huge success, he said, but that project was the proverbial icing on the cake.
“We did an incredible amount of work,” he said. “It went extremely well. The guys worked tirelessly. They had a goal to get to the end of this hallway (he gestured the length of the basement) and they surpassed it.”
Gale added that his soldiers were invested in the project because many of them are parents and they knew they were working on a project that would directly benefit children. Some of them volunteered to work extra hours or even slept in the building between shifts to get extra work done.
“They were so passionate about it,” said Gale.
Adam Binkley, executive director of the Summerside Boys and Girls Club, called the regiment a saving grace for the club’s aging facility, some of which is estimated to be about 100 years old.
“It was getting to a point where we knew there was some major concerns,” said Binkley.
The club contracted an engineer and architect to do a review of the building, and the results were not favourable.
“We weren’t in a position where we could wait a year or two to do the renovations, we needed to do them now,” he added.
“It was like a gift fell from the sky when we were introduced, through ACOA, … to NIHILO SAPPER.”
There is still a lot of work left to be done to the building, but it will be completed by local contractors. When finished, the club will have a number of new features, including a movie theatre.
Gale said all but one the projects the regiment set out to do on P.E.I. at the start of the exercise has been completed. The outlier was a bridge at the Mark Arendz Provincial Ski Park, which took longer than expected.
“We did an incredible amount of work. It went extremely well. The guys worked tirelessly. They had a goal to get to the end of this hallway (he gestured the length of the basement) and they surpassed it.” Lt.-Col. Jason Gale