Aside from replacing a ruined floor and more, the cleanup alone for damage done by a substantial leak in the ‘old’ gymnasium at Cider Mill School during February break will run around $80,000.
“This is not going to be an inexpensive fix,” Superintendent of Schools Kevin Smith told the Board of Education on Thursday night, Feb. 29. “The floor of the gym has been completely destroyed.”
“In addition, the floor in the foyer has been destroyed,” he said, explaining that the end cap of a water pipe that was rusty “failed” and caused the flooding.
The cleanup itself is estimated to be $58,000, with $23,000 needed for new wall mats and $1,700 estimated for repainting.
“I’ve been told the insurance company is going to cover it all,” Smith said, “but we haven’t seen that in writing.”
“The deductible is $10,000, so we’ll pay that,” he said.
Board Chair Ruth DeLuca noted that something similar happened last year in Cider Mill’s Library Learning Center and questioned whether it might be prudent to get some sort of monitoring system for the pipes during breaks.
Asked whether the accident would impact insurance costs to the school going forward, Chief Financial Officer Dawn Norton indicated that the insurance carrier reassesses the district each year.
“It’s possible that the insurance will go up,” she said.
I don’t know how this scales to something like a school, but WiFi-equipped leak detectors are pretty inexpensive – Wirecutter’s favorite one is $25 per sensor and $80 for the hub – so it seems like they could probably deploy a bunch of them in large flood-sensitive spaces like the gyms and the library and the cafeteria for not much more than their insurance deductible.
That being said, this is I believe the 3rd consecutive year we’ve had a serious building disaster at Cider Mill – lightning 2 years ago and the library flood last year – and while thus far the impact has been limited to property damage and lost instructional time, the problems are severe and frequent enough that you have to start wondering whether in the future they could start to jeopardize the safety of students and staff. We need to get serious about building repairs and we need to do that right away.
Isn’t it funny how when the $10K is not actually coming from your own pocket it is so easy to say ‘the deductible is $10,000 so we’ll pay that’? Has all of the other rusty piping been repaired or are we waiting for another $80K accident to happen. Who cares? The property assessments have all increased 30% or more, let the residents pay for it. It is ridiculous that something like that fell between the cracks, not once, but twice! Would you allow such rusty piping in your house? No… unless of course you want to pay a substantial deductible and higher premiums for the rest of your life. How much did the Cider Mill Library accident cost to repair? How much did insurance premiums increase because of that accident? The article is absolutely right that insurance premiums will increase. Maybe the Board of Education should subscribe to the WSJ and they would have a better idea on the increase in P&C premiums nationwide and consider themselves lucky if the insurance company decides to insure them going forward. Especially when the school knew there was a problem, did nothing to correct the problem and allowed another expensive accident to occur. This is absurd. Talk about learning a lesson. If it happens once, okay, if it happens twice in the same school, you should lose your job for not employing evaluations of the building on an annual basis, making the corrections and the Board of Education should also be held responsible. They were aware there was a problem and did nothing to fix it!!! This town is out of control with careless spending. How dare they increase our taxes to pay for irresponsible leadership in the school system. It would be a good idea to clean house of the current leadership in each of the schools and the Board of Education.