On Friday morning, a day after heavy rainfall swept through the area, a familiar scene greeted staff at New Hope High School.
Water had seeped into the less than four-year-old building from 35 or more current leaks, according to Lowndes County School District Superintendent Sam Allison’s estimates.
“Some are brand new,” Allison said. “Some are recurring ones we’ve tried to fix and haven’t been able to.”
Just a few hours before Thursday’s rain started, the school board took a major, and expensive, step toward ending the roof leaks at the high school, granting a $1,670,167 contract to Standard Roofing of Montgomery, Alabama, to install a tar emergency roof on the facility.
The move comes amid ongoing litigation in Lowndes County Circuit Court over alleged deficiencies in the roofing that are causing the leaks.
Project architect Joey Henderson with JBHM Architects said materials for the emergency roof can be on site in four to six weeks and work should be complete by the end of September.
“In order to protect our investment, we need to move forward with an emergency fix,” Allison said Thursday.
The $24 million New Hope High School was the most expensive of the projects funded by a taxpayer-approved $44 million bond issue in 2015. However, school officials claim roof leaks started emerging soon after the facility was completed in 2018. Since then, they say total leaks number in the hundreds.
LCSD in August 2020 sued general contractor West Brothers, roof installer Lindsey Roofing and material supplier GAF Materials, alleging deficiencies in both the materials and installation of the roof. The district is seeking $2 million in actual and punitive damages. West Brothers and Lindsey Roofing have both been patching leaks when asked.
The defendants have denied the district’s allegations, claiming instead in court documents the leaks could be caused by the structure shifting. LCSD hired a structural and roofing engineer who produced a study indicating that wasn’t the case.
In turn, GAF hired an engineer whose report, according to court documents, partially blamed deficient work on the steel roof deck for the leaks. Based on that report, West Brothers filed a third-party complaint against Jackson-based Carey’s Construction Company, the subcontractor that installed the roof deck.
The bogged-down litigation, board attorney Jeff Smith said, has pushed the trial date to 2023, though a settlement could be reached before then.
“Meanwhile, we have a new building that’s taking in water every time we have a heavy rain and a roof that continues to form new leaks,” Allison said.
The emergency roof has a 20-year warranty, though Smith told The Dispatch it would likely not be there that long.
“After all this is over, the emergency roof and the (original) roof will all be removed and replaced,” Smith said. “It will then be brought up to the standard it should have been built to in 2018.”
The district will remove portions of the original roof to use as support for its case, Smith said.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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