Four-pad repairs to be completed on time
Repairs at the city’s SeymourHannah complex are expected to be completed on time, but city council is still waiting for answers about what went wrong in the first place.
Concrete was re-poured in final rink at the four-pad facility at 240 St. Paul St. W. on Wednesday.
“It will take a few weeks to let it harden, put the boards up, finish some of the piping to the equipment room and put some finishing touches on it,” St. Catharines director of transportation and engineering Dan Dillon said Thursday.
Dillon said the arena complex is scheduled to open mid-September, in time for hockey season.
The $21.3-million sports and entertainment complex, which opened in September 2005, has undergone major repairs over the past two summers.
In 2015, city staff noticed humps in the ice and brought in an engineering firm which found multiple deficiencies.
That led to city council budgeting $4 million to re-do all four rink pads and their underground piping.
The first phase of the project to repair rinks 1 and 4 in summer 2016 came in below the $2-million budget at $1.56 million.
Pads 2 and 3 are being repaired this summer and the costs are still being calculated. Dillon said there was more frozen material that had to be removed under the pads in Phase 2 than Phase 1.
He said he expected the two phases would come within the total original budget.
Couns. Bill Phillips of Grantham and Matt Harris of St. Andrew’s sit on a task force overseeing arena repairs and both say they’ve been impressed with the job they’ve seen so far.
Phillips said Schilthuis Construction has more than 100 arenas to its name and CIMCO, the consultant the city hired to oversee the work, did Meridian Centre and NHL rinks in Canada.
“I’m very confident these companies have solved the problem and we will not have problems for a long, long time,” Phillips said.
When city council gave the goahead for arena repairs in November 2015, it also requested a report from city staff about how things went so terribly wrong so fast at the decade-old facility.
Harris said it would be nice to get the report so council can figure out why things went wrong to ensure it doesn’t happen again. They also need to have some answers for the taxpayer.
“Any time you’re spending $4 million, you want to know why,” he said. “It’s unacceptable and people have the right to get the answers. Why did all the piping fail? What caused all the frost in the ground? What caused the pipes to heave?”
He said council needs to know sooner rather than later if the problems were caused by a construction issue or a maintenance issue so they can put more safeguards in place.
Phillips said he’s also asked for a report from the consultant about what they think caused the problems.
“I’m hoping that at the very end there will be a report with the findings so they can compare all four pads,” Phillips said.
Dillon said he hopes to have a report to city council in the fall.
He said he’s waiting for test results from a soil consultant hired to test an area where the header pipe was for the hot floor system, because that seems to be what failed.
“We’re still waiting on some of that to put together a more compete picture of what happened and why,” Dillon said.