Demolition causes debris to fall through band hall ceiling

By Cindy Dinh     5/15/08 7:00pm

The Marching Owl Band has experienced everything from rained-out shows to football fans who disagree with their sense of humor at halftime performances, and now they face an unexpected disturbance from construction crews.Director of Bands Chuck Throckmorton said the band hall has seen numerous pieces of debris fall through the ceiling this semester.

"Since January, we've had pieces of concrete, mucky water and even a metal pipe fall through the ceiling tiles," Throckmorton said.

The marching, symphonic and jazz bands rehearse in the basement of the former Hicks Kitchen, which is located off of Campanile Drive and Entrance 20. Construction crews have demolished the space above the band hall to make way for the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. This collaborative engineering kitchen is expected to be completed next fall and will provide space for undergraduate engineering, statistics, materials science, computational and applied mathematics and computer science students.

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Throughout this process, quarter-sized pieces of concrete and dust have frequently fallen through the ceiling tiles into the band hall and the band director's office, Throckmorton said.

The largest piece of debris to fall thus far has been a section of a floor drainpipe.

"A Bobcat, a small bulldozer, was on the first floor lifting out debris when it caught one of the floor drains and the pipe underneath," Facilities, Engineering and Planning project manager Anzilla Gilmore said. "[The bulldozer] clipped the pipe, and it fell through the ceiling tile." ?

Gilmore said the cast-iron floor drainpipe was two inches in diameter and about two feet long. She said she and the construction contractor from Spawglass came down to the band hall immediately afterward. No one was in the space below during this incident, so there were no injuries.

"We've been lucky to not have been directly hit," Throckmorton said. "A couple of times it was just because we were not standing there at the time."

Major demolition began in January and was limited to the hours of 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., before the bands rehearsed.

"Any time we knew the students were there, we stopped with demolition," Gilmore said. "Safety is our first concern."

Before beginning the demolition process, Gilmore had members of the construction company check out the band hall to be aware of the holes in the floor above where the demolition was taking place and to see how their work was affecting band members underneath.

MOB drum minor and symphonic clarinetist Jamie Sammis said she feels the demolition crews forgot about the students that were also using the facilities.

"I think they didn't take into account that people were in that part of the building, and they got wrapped up in the project," Sammis, a Brown College sophomore, said.

To curb the amount of dust particles and small debris from the construction above, construction crews installed plastic sheets in the hallways.

Gilmore said these sheets prevented most of the debris fallout from impinging on the bands in the basement.

"The ceiling tiles are catching almost everything [that falls]. A lot of the plastic can catch all of the dust, plaster and anything of substantial size," Gilmore said.

Gilmore said the rumor about harmful asbestos in the band hall was not true. Rather, she said non-friable asbestos, which is non-hazardous, was used in some of the materials in the original design for the building.

Environmental Health and Safety director Kathryn Cavender said the asbestos was removed before demolition began.

"There was asbestos in the mechanical room on some of the pipes and non-friable asbestos that went around the air ductwork," Cavender said. "All of that was removed prior to the start of the project."

Cavender said the asbestos in the band hall is in the form of mastic, a black tar that attaches fiberglass to the air conditioning duct covering.

"What causes problems and health concern is when [asbestos] becomes friable, which means it becomes airborne," Cavender said. "When you glue it to something like with the black mastic, then the fibers can no longer get into the air. Even if you tried to eat it, you couldn't breathe it, which is how it damages you."

Before beginning demolition on the upstairs of Hicks Kitchen, D&T Contracting, a licensed asbestos abatement company and Bay Environmental, a third-party air monitoring company, checked the air quality last November to ensure that the asbestos was not airborne.

Despite these temporary remedies, members of the bands still experienced setbacks.

"For the symphonic band, we've had a couple of weeks where we had to cancel rehearsals," Throckmorton said.

Throckmorton said fumes from construction and odors from the septic tank that runs from the basement restroom to the first floor gave him no choice but to cancel rehearsals.

Symphonic and Jazz Band member Julia Botev said the recent demolition has rendered the band hall more of a sewer than a rehearsal space.

"While they were doing construction, they actually knocked down some of the walls that surrounded the pipes, and you can smell [the pipe contents] all the time, and it's permeating through the halls," Botev, a Martel College freshman, said. "For a while, it was chemical-smelling, and then recently it's been smelling like sewage."

To avoid more cancellations, band members devised a solution.

"If you were going in the band hall, you would open it an hour early and get fans going to blow the fumes out," Sammis said. "Once we got a system, it worked out."

Typically, the symphonic band has two concerts in the spring. However, due to construction and its sporadic rehearsal schedule, the band performed just one concert this semester.

"It's been inconvenient that we've had to miss rehearsals, but our end-of-the-year concert was a campus construction concert," Sammis said.

In tune with the themed concert, band members donned construction hard hats during their performance.

"We figured out we could embrace it and celebrate it, because it's not like it's going to be permanent," Sammis said. "It's highly inconvenient, but it's not permanent."

Plans for renovating the band hall have been discussed but are not in the near future, Throckmorton said.

"Right now, the room is too small for the number of people we have in here and too short, which makes it so loud," Throckmorton said. "Sound has to have room to dissipate. [The room] really is not ideal."

He said the initiative to build a new band hall is on the list of things Rice will do, but is currently not of high priority.

Botev said she disagrees with Rice's priorities in light of its recent focus on college expansion and increasing enrollment.

"I think it's kind of ridiculous that the school is spending so much money on building new colleges, expanding enrollment, redoing the grove between Hanszen and Will Rice, and they won't even give the non-major music program a second look," Botev said.

Throckmorton said he thinks the new engineering kitchen will be helpful to students.

"It's a really neat project that I think is valuable to Rice, which is why I'm willing to put up with this for a few more weeks," Throckmorton said.

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