The engineering report unveiled at Tuesday night’s Oxford Board of Education meeting explaining why the high school’s walls cracked last month states that a support clip was missing on the building’s second floor.
The March 7 report from Pustola & Associates states that the actual construction of the wall differed slightly from the blue prints.
Click here to read how school officials reacted.
The engineers inspected a supporting roof clip above the second floor and determined there was a space there that wasn’t supposed to be there.
However, no signs of distress were discovered, the report states.
In addition, a support clip on the second floor was never installed as planned.
The engineers, along with the structural engineers who designed the five-year-old building and the building’s architect, all agreed that “the clip should have been there.”
O & G, the company that built the school, corrected the situation by reinforcing the wall with steel plates.
School custodians discovered cracks in a wall inside the school Thursday, Feb. 3. The cracks — and concerns about the roof’s capacity to hold the heavy snow load — canceled classes at the school until Feb. 10.
In its conclusion, the engineer’s report concludes that although the wall was constructed based upon approved drawings, “the intent of the contract drawings was not completely fulfilled.”
The supplemental bracing “was added to fulfill the design intent and more importantly to insure that any future snow loads” like the ones experienced this winter “would not impact the soft joints as they did on this occasion.”
The full report is posted below.
