Repairs will cost Ajax an extra $250,000 on a multi-million dollar project
Nov 12, 2009 - 12:07 PM
By Reka Szekely
AJAX -- The Town got an unpleasant surprise when workers restoring the St. Francis de Sales church got a good look at the tower and found it is structurally unsound.
When a section of the tower was opened up, workers discovered an area where the bricks had disintegrated after water seeped in and repeatedly went through the freeze-thaw cycle.
"It's dust, it's been completely saturated and it's damaged," said Catherine Bridgeman, a project manager for the Town.
The damaged area is a significant portion of the building, which is located on Church Street in Pickering Village.
"It's a huge element on the spire and it supports the whole understructure," she said.
It will cost an additional $250,000 to repair the problem. Ms. Bridgeman said experts in building restoration have said a temporary patch is not an option. Leaving it as is creates a health and safety issue given that many people walk by the church and there is a school next door.
"We need to do this to structurally reinforce the tower. If we don't, the tower is structurally unsafe."
Councillors asked Ms. Bridgeman at a recent general government committee meeting if the problem could have been foreseen.
She replied although the Town had conducted an assessment of the church prior to starting the renovations, it was impossible to get an indepth look at the bricks until the $80,000 scaffolding for the restoration went up.
"The spire is something you have to get up to, you have to engineer the scaffolding and you have to take a look."
Ms. Bridgeman added that unpleasant surprises are not uncommon with historic buildings.
The church was built in 1871 and Ajax bought it from the Archdiocese of Toronto in 2007 for $50,000. Since then, the Town has done work to structurally reinforce the church, readying it for the retrofit.
The almost $2.- million transformation of the church into a community performing arts and culture venue is being paid for jointly by Town, the federal government and the Province.
Councillors agreed to commit the additional funds necessary to fix the spire.
Mayor Parish said although he'd rather the problem didn't exist, there was no way it could have been foreseen.
"We're well advanced in this and I think it's a great project and we're just going to have to do it," he said. "There's no way around this."
Councillor Colleen Jordan said she agreed with expenditure, but she was hoping this was the last problem of this sort for the project.
"That's a very difficult question to answer in a heritage facility until you start peeling back the layers of the onion," replied Ms. Bridgeman.
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