Courthouse plans up in the air after collapse

Historic portion of building collapses during renovation

Renovation plans for the Gunnison County Courthouse project took a major step backward this week as portions of the historic building that were supposed to be preserved crumbled to the ground in heaps of dust and debris.

According to Matthew Birnie, Gunnison County manager, a crew of masons was working on preserving some bricks in the interior of the west part of the building on Friday, March 14, when workers on the outside of the building grew concerned about the amount of building materials and other debris sloughing off the exterior walls. The masons were evacuated from the building and the site superintendent was called over to evaluate the situation.
At that time, workers and the superintendent noticed more materials falling from the exterior of the building’s south side, again above where masons were working to preserve interior sections of the historic building. Those masons were also asked to leave the work area. Moments after their evacuation a large section of the south wall collapsed into a heap of rubble.
“The collapse occurred above a section where the foundation of the building had been removed and then not supported in any way during a previous construction project,” said Birnie. “We’re very lucky we don’t have earthquakes around here, or we would have seen that whole building come down way earlier.”
Portions of the building continued to collapse over the weekend.
The structural failure of the historic part of the courthouse has large, and likely very expensive, ramifications for the courthouse project. Renovating the original 1881 portions of the building and integrating them into new construction was an integral part of the architecture and construction plans for the courthouse project, said Birnie.
“All of that space from the old building was going to be useful space in the new building,” Birnie said. “Now it’s unclear how we’re going to move forward. The design team is working on potential ways to save the building and crews are working to stabilize the structure in the interim. But we have no sense of what this is going to cost, only that it is going to be much more and it will likely take much longer.”
According to the project timeline, demolition was supposed to have been completed this week, allowing for backfilling crews to begin working next week, and building construction was to begin the first weeks in April. Now, with the instabilities uncovered in the structure and the existing danger to work crews, the entire project is at a standstill.
“The whole area is now basically off limits,” said Birnie. “We can’t have people in doing the backfilling because of the vibrations that the equipment can cause. We just have to wait until we figure out the best way to proceed, and the concern is that this could be such a long delay that it could be fatal to the path of the project and we will have to go in a completely different direction.”
The original renovation plans called for the demolition of much of the courthouse structure, which was a hodgepodge of construction over the last hundred years. Within that, however, were sections of the original 1881 building that the county hoped to preserve.
“We didn’t know exactly what we were going to find in there, and we knew going into the project that the original 1881 portions might not be salvageable,” said Birnie. “All the professionals who looked at the building early on said it could be saved, but even they couldn’t tell everything until they started peeling it apart.”
Original estimates showed the courthouse construction would take about 18 months, starting this spring, and would cost about $14.5 million. Those figures are no longer accurate.
“We’re very up in the air right now with both the timing and the cost,” said Birnie. “We just know it’s going to be a lot more money and take a lot more time, and there’s a limit to the resources we can put into the original project.”
As of now, the county is waiting to see what the project designers and managers suggest about salvaging what remains of the historic construction. There is a chance that some aspects may still be able to be incorporated into the new building, but it is also possible that the county will need to go in a direction that requires a complete tear-down of the old structure.
“Our original plan was to take care of the bricks on the interior, then coat the whole section with Shockcrete,” said Birnie. “If we could have gotten to that stage it would have been a new strong building. The real unfortunate part is that we were getting there, we were really close, and we just didn’t quite make it.”