A massive excavator with a claw attached began to eat away at the gym walls, making the huge cinder blocks and rebar look like styrofoam and sticks.
A third of the roof collapsed in mid-February during a snowstorm that dumped almost 700,000 pounds of snow on top of it.
Ron Havniear, the Medford School District’s director of security, leadership and facilities, said the demolition is moving slowly because engineers are still trying to figure out what caused the collapse.
“We got to go at the pace of the engineers and the insurers,” he said, “to make sure we keep the other portion of the building still intact and keep everybody safe.”
The careful demolition of the gym could take about a month.
The crew is tearing down the northeast corner of the building, where the collapse happened, to allow forensic engineers a closer look inside and determine the cause.
Havniear said it’s probably a combination of factors, including the heavy snow load, beams over 60 years old and possible impacts from seismic retrofitting to the gym last summer.
Most of the building remained standing, including the locker rooms, weight room and the upper gym.
“If we determine that the other two-thirds is not salvageable, then it’ll be a full tear down,” Havniear said.
He said if it is salvageable, then they’d build back the gym with a similar but stronger design.
The district’s insurance company will pay to rebuild the gym, which Havniear said could take a year to complete and cost several million dollars.
In the meantime, he said they’re looking at moving gym activities outside as the weather gets nice and fundraising to build a temporary structure for the next school year.
