WESTLOCK – Westlock’s Pioneer Museum, which has had numerous issues with its roof over the last decade, will see $14,000 in repairs.
Council approved the expenditure 6-0 at its Aug. 10 meeting — $7,560 is slated for the roof repair, while $6,440 is for interior work and contingency. The money will come from the municipality’s general reserve.
In his briefing to council director of operations Grant Gyurkovits said the area of the roof that is leaking is where the horizontal steel glad roofing meets the vertical section. To his knowledge this area of the roof has never been worked on.
“There’s a section that was an addition to the original building. And when they built that it was designed or done properly. It just doesn’t cut it. When the wind blows up against this section ... you can see there’s an opening between the top of the metal cladding and as you start to go down and there’s an opening and that’s where the water is getting in. It was never sealed up properly,” said Gyurkovits.
The repair covers 1,200 square feet and will consist of applying a two-ply SBS roofing system that will see the removal of all the metal sheeting. The next step will be to cover the area with new plywood and following there will be a two-layer application of torch on SBS which will create a watertight seal.
Gyurkovits’ briefing notes that in the interior of the museum the celling sags will be removed and re-gyprocked, taped, mudded and then painted.
In his briefing, Gyurkovits said when the museum addition was built in the 1990s the original roof was reworked to create a positive/negative one per cent positive slope — this section is currently holding up.
“There doesn’t appear to be any other existing problems, but nothing lasts forever,” Gyurkovits said.
“It’s been four or five years since we’ve been done some work,” added mayor Ralph Leriger.
The Westlock Pioneer Museum contains thousands of objects, many of them donated by the descendants of early settlers in the Westlock area, including smaller surrounding communities such as Clyde, Dapp, Linaria, Busby, Pickardville, Pibroch, Jarvie and Flatbush.
The museum is run by the Westlock and District Historical Society, which was created in 1962 with the mission of preserving the history of the area and passing it on to future generations.
