A local contractor who worked as foreman on a Haines High School roof replacement in 1999 this week questioned a proposed $1.4 million bond for replacing the roof, saying decades-old leaks have persisted through multiple roofs and a major patch job.
Dan Humphrey said the history of the issue suggests water is infiltrating the school somewhere other than the roof, possibly through seams in a utility “penthouse” that sits atop the school, or through a building duct system.
“For someone to think that spending $1.4 million on a new roof will fix all these mysterious leaks, it’s not going to… A logical person would rule out the roof,” Humphrey said in an interview.
Humphrey’s characterization is supported by Henry Chatoney, who worked as school maintenance man in the 1980s and this week said the leaks go back to the 1970s. By Chatoney’s count, the roof was resurfaced at least three times between school construction in 1973 and the 1999 project.
“They’ve put two or three new roofs up there and it hasn’t fixed anything,” said Chatoney, who blames the leaks on a rooftop expansion joint the penthouse sits on. “They built the penthouse on top of it, so there’s no way you can get to it to do anything. I would have fixed it in the 1980s if it was fixable.”
Borough facilities director Carlos Jimenez said he’s interested in speaking to the former workers. Jimenez said his intuition wasn’t to replace the roof but to look for weak spots. The school board and assembly supported the larger, bonded project because the 1999 roof is approaching the end of its expected life and 70 percent reimbursement is available from the state.
Humphrey is a 35-year resident who also worked as a general contractor here for 20 years. In 1999, he was working for Keetowah Construction, a local company that replaced the high school and pool roofs for $237,000.
The existing roof is a “torchdown” or rubberized asphalt coating that is widely, generally durable and easily repaired. It also can be covered with a second layer of torchdown for a fraction of the bond amount, Humphrey said.
“Torchdown has proven itself to be repairable and workable with very little skills necessary. It’s made to be repaired. It has a 25-year life expectancy. It’s sad to think somebody’s going to tear that whole thing out without knowing what the problem is,” Humphrey said.
Humphrey and Chatoney said problems with the roof date back to the building’s construction, and the fact that the poured concrete surface atop the school was never intended to be a roof. It was built as a floor for a second story on the building that never went up. The expansion joint is a seam that was to allow the floor to expand and contract, and the penthouse was built to temporarily cover heat-distribution equipment until the second story was completed. “That roof’s not a roof. It’s the upper floor they never built.”
Chatoney said several hot-tar roofs were put down on the poured asphalt floor. The roofs were intended to hold water, which would serve to preserve the tar, keeping it from drying out and cracking. The last version of that roof before 1999 was a “floating roof” that involved interlocking foam panels that sat on top of the water, to keep it from freezing in winter.
“It was kind of an odd design for Alaska, but it worked,” Humphrey said.
But besides coming in above the open area, water also was flowing over the roof’s edge, infiltrating walls, Humphrey said. That spurred the Keetowah’s 1998 rebuild, which included addition of a parapet wall which apparently fixed leakage down the walls.
Humphrey and Chatoney noted that despite the fact that water sat on the roof for decades, leaks came down in the open area only during certain conditions, typically involving snow, followed by a thaw and high winds. That suggested the problem wasn’t with the roof itself.
An architect working on the 1999 roof replacement also heard Chatoney’s theory and directed Keetowah to caulk seams around the penthouse wall, Humphrey said
“I don’t think (the architect) really believed (the water) was coming from the wall. He was hoping the work we were doing would fix the leak. But we didn’t find the leak. We just caulked the hell out of that (penthouse) wall. Everybody who’s worked on that roof has calked that wall and looked for that leak without being able to find it,” Humphrey said.
Keetowah’s work included dismantling the “floating roof,” opening drains and adding a slight incline to the roof so water would run off it. Workers stripped the roof down to the concrete floor, placing styrofoam of tapered thickness on top of it (to create the incline), putting a layer of fiberboard on top, covering that in tarpaper, then rolling out the torchdown surface.
After the 1999 work, leaking over the open area continued.
That led the district to spend what Humprhey estimates was about $50,000 on a different style covering called a “membrane roof” over a large section of roof near the penthouse.
“I didn’t think it was going to help. Putting membrane on torchdown is totally redundant. As soon as they put it in, it leaked,” Humphrey said. “That showed me it’s the same problem from the 1980s. It hasn’t been figured out.”
Humphrey said instead of replacing the roof, he’d inspect closely every penetration point atop the school, looking at pipes, vents, walls. “The roof doesn’t need repair, as far as I know.”
Chatoney said short of putting a second story on the school, he’s not sure what the district should do next, but he doesn’t support spending $1.4 million on a new roof. The best solution may be just to live with the leaks, he said. “That’s what they’ve been doing since the 1970s.”