Opening of Powell River Public Library’s new location at Crossroads Village Shopping Centre will be delayed this fall due to seismic upgrading.
Chief librarian Terry Noreault said the library is now potentially looking at a November 15 opening.
“We’re still excited about the move and a little disappointed that it’s two months longer, but we’ve been waiting 30 years, so we can wait,” he said. “It’s just something that happens when you do a renovation. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to find until you are in it.”
Despite two significant renovations during its life, seismic upgrades to the building, constructed in the 1960s as Powell River’s Hudson Bay Company, were found to be more complicated than initial plans indicated.
City of Powell River director of infrastructure Tor Birtig said the additional cost of the work will be borne by the contractor Futurevest, a corporation owned by Powell River residents Michele Sauve, Réal Sigouin and Kevin Sigouin, as well as two former residents, Fred Formosa and Francis Sauve.
“We don’t have an exact schedule from them yet,” said Birtig, “but it has taken a fair amount of time for them to go through it.”
Contractors found that two walls thought to be up to seismic standards were not and additional work was necessary to stabilize them.
The two walls are the one-storey west wall and the two-storey north wall, said Noreault.
The north wall, explained Noreault, is made from three different kinds of concrete block, so there in not a single void through them all to allow steel rods to be placed and secured with cement. Contractors have had to build a two-by-six structure on the outside to stabilize it.
“It turned out to be more work than assumed and took a little longer,” said Noreault.
Birtig added that due to the nature of the work the contractor has had to be sensitive to the building’s second-floor businesses.
He said there was no way of knowing what bricks were used until contractors were able to get in to look at them.
Another area where the project may run into delays is the roof, depending on the results of recent layer testing, said Birtig.
Not all the news from the renovation has been bad, said Noreault. Recent work led to discovering the building’s concrete floor is about 7.5 centimetres thicker than what is indicated in the plans and that means it will be more than adequate to handle the weight of approximately 35,000 books.
“Good things can happen, too,” said Noreault, “as you dig in.”
