After hearing about new and serious structural issues found in the Centennial Arena, Elliot Lake City Councillor Luc Morrissette asked the question that is certainly on the minds of many Elliot Lakers.
"Are we confident that patrons and other people in the arena would be safe?"
"I would never let it happen that we put people in the building if it wasn't safe," said Dr. Dan Tingley of Wood Research and Design (WRD), who joined council's special meeting by Zoom.
Tingley is WRD's founder and global structural engineer of record. He also holds 42 patents related to timber engineering.
At a special meeting on Wednesday, council heard that once the walls were opened, columns inspected and core samples taken of the concrete footings, many more significant problems were discovered in the arena.
"I didn't know what was down there [when I made my initial estimate for repairs to the building]," he said. "I couldn't possibly know."
Not all the footings have been inspected, but the ones that have are very problematic, Tingley said.
The column by the Zamboni door was, in essence, just dangling there and twisting as frost heaved the ground below it, he explained.
No matter how the roof was fixed, the leaks would have continued as long as the problems with the footings and columns persisted, he added.
"As many as 50 per cent of the footings might need replacement," he said. But that wouldn't solve the problems.
The footings are too small, are placed in soil with little to no load-bearing capacity and some of them are degraded, he explained.
When inspectors tried to take a core sample of the footing under the column by the Zamboni door, they were unable to because they couldn't extract a core that didn't crumble.
Replacing or repairing the footings would be cost-prohibitive if they could even find a contractor available to do the work in time to have the building open to occupancy by mid- to late-September as council intended, Tingley added.
He also said he felt that attempting to make these repairs was more dangerous than he was comfortable with, especially since they have not yet excavated and inspected all the footings.
He went on to explain that he wasn't sure it could be safely braced while footings were replaced or repaired.
As reported earlier by ElliotLakeToday, the arena was closed last September after Tingley inspected it and found dangerous structural issues that were mainly due to “significant [roof] leaking over a prolonged period.”
He also noted that since his inspection five years ago, “critical elements in the trusses and columns had decayed in areas that were previously acceptable.” It was when these conditions were noted that the arena was closed in September for public safety.
The engineer suggested another solution: an outrigger system.
It's a structural system used in a lot of very tall skyscrapers but in those, it's designed to be inside the building between the outer walls and inner core structure. It's designed to reduce the overall drift of the building while distributing its load through columns to its foundation.
Tingley is confident that using an outrigger system on the outside of the building will also stop it from flexing so much that it damages the roof again.
He said the system would support the whole structure through the knee wall of the building at each of the 22 columns that currently bear the weight of the structure. This would transfer some of that weight off the columns rendering the building safe and preventing it from moving so much.
"They would only go out from the building about five to six feet so they wouldn't interfere with the use of areas around it like the parking lot and such," said Tingley.
Councillor Helen Lefebvre asked what the expected lifetime of the outrigger system would be.
"It will be like a new building," Tingley said. "You'll get new build life out of it. Another 60 to 75 years. What I'm saying is that this would be a permanent solution, not a temporary repair."
Council informally authorized Tingley to go ahead with the addition of an outrigger system to the arena so it can be open to the public on time despite the project turning out to be much more comprehensive than first estimated.