ATHABASCA — Members of the Athabasca Regional Multiplex Society are steaming following the discovery that boilers at the facility were never installed properly.
At the March 2 meeting, facility manager Tim Wolfenberg informed the society, which is comprised of representatives from the town and county, that a technician from Startec had revealed the issue with the boilers and the society will be reaching out to all parties involved in the construction and installation to see if the work can be covered and will decide at a future meeting the appropriate course of action based on those responses.
“When we had the technician in, we provided him with all the construction documentation of what had been signed off on and provided him with the installation manuals for the boiler itself,” said Wolfenberg. “And so, he reviewed all that documentation and compared to how it was installed and has determined there were multiple failures on that.”
Startec will be producing a final report on the findings as well as a quote on what needs to be done to rectify the situation.
“What we're going to be investigating over the next little bit here is determining if there are still contacts of contractors that were working on this project. If so, great. We may still have some information there and a channel to go through,” he said. “If some of those people have moved on … that's where it will lead to litigation.”
Wolfenberg said only one of the two boilers for the pool side of the building has been working and the concern is that if the working one goes down, especially in winter, every line in that area will have to be drained.
“Since the day I've started here, the one boiler has been working on 100 per cent of the load for the past 10 months,” he said.
Because the ventilation stacks are too close together, the chemicals being released by the working boiler are going back down into the other one and has caused so much oxidization that even though the boiler is basically brand new it will need to be replaced.
“The current operating one is still going through those current conditions but because it has been running it pushes a little bit more flue gas out and doesn't allow as much moisture back in,” said Wolfenberg. “We've also made some changes on the roof to bank the exhaust for the non-working boiler because they were set so closely together, the flue gases that went out the one stack sucked right back in the other.”
For upwards of 12 to 16 months without the boiler working and all the caustic flue gas sitting in large concentrations at the bottom of it, it has rusted out wiring as well as the metal.
“It's a real disaster,” he said.
Athabasca County Coun. Ashtin Anderson said she was not in favour of just replacing the boiler without talking to a lawyer as well as looking through the building contracts to see if there is some kind of recourse.
“I also want to point out that the number in front of us is just over $100,000, but really, this could be a $200,000 problem,” Anderson said. “As Tim is pointing out, it's caused additional wear and tear on the second boiler and so there's a potential that this isn't $100,000, this is $200,000 to replace both boilers.”
The estimated cost to correct the venting is almost $30,000 and a new boiler is close to $59,000.
