USM’s libraries don’t normally close for long weekends, but over the Martin Luther King Day weekend, Gorham’s Bailey Hall Library took advantage of the lack of classes to make some much needed repairs.
On the morning of Jan. 4 during a routine walkthrough of the building, a member of the USM facilities management department discovered that a pipe in the wall of the library had burst. The burst pipe was attributed to the extreme cold. “Since then, we’ve been cleaning up,” said Edward Moore, a circulation associate at the library who has been involved in the cleanup.
Facilities’ initial estimate, in the email released last Monday, was that repairs of the library would cost approximately $100,000, a price which would be covered by USM’s insurance deductible. Bertram later revised this estimate to over $100,000, and said that the difference would be paid from USM’s budgeted capital maintenance fund.
Last Monday, Robert Bertram, executive director of Facilities Management, sent out an email to all students, telling them that the leak had occurred and been resolved enough that the library would be opening as normal as classes resumed. “We’ve been providing the same service we always have,” Moore said on Friday, at the end of a week of classes following the flooding.
However, Moore said that there is still work to be done, including repairs, painting, furniture replacement and work on the floors. Last Thursday, Adam Thibodeau, Director of Engineering and Architecture services with Facilities Management, who is overseeing the repairs, sent out an email to the campus community providing notification that the Bailey Hall library would be closed for repairs over the long weekend, through Monday. The particular repairs to be done that weekend, wrote Thibodeau, were asbestos abatement, which would be undertaken under th`e guidelines set out by Maine DES and EPA procedure regulations, with the goal of abating several of the library’s study areas and the 223D Polycom Room, which is where the leak began.
Further work is intended to be undertaken over February break, with the timing for any more work to be determined later.