Cracking down on a problem

Despite recent rumors, two residence halls on the campus of Georgia College & State University are not sinking.
Though there are numerous wall cracks and sinking floors in Parkhurst and Foundation Residence Halls, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Dr. Paul Jahr says they are not out of the ordinary.
“There are no structural issues with Parkhurst or Foundation that I am aware of,” said Jahr. “When you build a four-story wood structure and it starts to acclimatize to the air, the wood expands and contracts, causing a number of what I will call ‘cosmetic’ cracks in the dry wall.”
Associate Director for Planning, Construction and Business Services Rick Ruark agrees.
“The settling that’s happening is fairly normal,” he said. “The structural integrity is not being compromised.”
According to Jahr, the “sink holes” in the buildings’ floors formed due to damage that occurred during the build.
“Apparently in the course of construction, some of the [substrata] was damaged before the floor went down. When I say damage, basically, there’s a rut in it, and it starts to crumble,” Jahr said. “I guess when they were wheeling the heavy drywall, there’s a good chance that a wheel hit an imperfection or a joint and it might have damaged it and started a crack.”
Jahr said the damage was not significant at the time of the build, but everyday wear and tear has progressively caused deterioration.
“The contractor who did the floor covering is very good and his people would not have automatically overlooked it. It’s something that could have been damaged in settling and people’s traffic,” he said.
Jahr stresses that student safety is not at risk.
“I’m not a structural engineer, but I have absolutely no reason to believe students are at risk. The university and the LLC, which is the technical owner, had employed on-site representatives who eye-balled everything as the construction process was underway,” he said. “Trust me, they have been fire marshaled to death, they have been structurally engineered to death, and there is no reason to believe that anybody is unsafe.”
Jahr says the developer has been contacted and will come back to address these issues in the next couple of weeks.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 13 2004. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry