Repairs Made to Storm Damaged School Buildings

As schools were closed Thursday, repairs were being made to campus buildings in order to get them ready for classes on Friday.
Director of Schools Mark Willoughby said high winds from Wednesday afternoon’s severe weather caused some damage to DeKalb Middle School and the Vocational School at DCHS while snapping an electric line, providing a primary power source to DCHS. “When daylight came (Thursday) we found some more damage. Up on top of the middle school, as you drive by you could see that it had blown off the siding next to the roof, probably 25 to 30 feet in two different spots. On top of the roof of the middle school, metal which evidently came from some other place cut six or seven places in the roof where it had blown metal around. We’ve had a company up there, Porter Roofing fixing those cuts. They think they have all those particular spots fixed as to damage to the roof, temporarily fixed anyway. There are some blowers inside drying out the building from the leaks. The maintenance department and custodians worked Wednesday night and Thursday drying things out to make sure the water coming into the building didn’t get out of control. We had some pretty good leaks in the middle school,” said Willoughby.
“It (winds) blew one of the windows in at the vocational school,” according to Willoughby. “The force of the wind blew in one of the large windows. It did not break the window. It did not shatter. We were able to put that back in. There is no structural damage. We had some people to look. So that window was secured back in and braced. There was some siding that blew off the vocational building. We had two or three twenty five foot strips of rubber that came off the side of the roof of the vocational school,” he said
“The football field scoreboard is twisted. The baseball scoreboard is down. We’ve got a fence down where a large tree has fallen on it. All in all we were very fortunate that we did not get any more damage than what did happen,” said Willoughby
Director Willoughby said except for some concerns about electricity to the building, the high school did not receive any significant storm damage. “There was no structural damage at the high school. We had one little place where it looked like it had blown the siding off the back of the high school but upon examining it further, we don’t believe that was from the storm. It was just a little bit loose up there at the top of the building where the roof and the siding met. We had to have the electric company come in Thursday morning. If we had to, we could have had school Thursday with the exception of dealing with the electricity. We were not sure of all the areas of the school where electricity was available everywhere in the school Wednesday night but we got there Thursday morning and had to do some additional work. There were more reasons than just the roof why we did not go to school Thursday,” said Willoughby.
Storm winds also blew down a traffic caution light on West Broad Street near the schools.
Schools reopened Friday morning but closed again at noon due to the threat of more severe weather.