Melissa Bailey Photo
Before a wrecking ball hits the East Rock Global Magnet School, a professional salvager is leading a last-minute charge to save 7,000 square feet of maple flooring.
Joe DeRisi (pictured), general managing partner at Urbanminers LLC in Hamden, said he recently toured the K‑8 school at 133 Nash St., which is slated for demolition in the next five months as part of the mayor’s $1.5 billion school construction program. A new school is planned to open in the fall of 2012 to replace the old one, which was built in 1973 and whose large, windowless walls of concrete left kids in a dark environment that some referred to as “prison.”
As the demolition process progressed, East Rock neighbors discovered some usable furniture in Dumpsters behind the school over the summer. Many other items were salvaged. Inside the school, the one-inch thick floor in the gymnasium remains.
During his visit, DeRisi took out a little piece of the floor. He concluded it would be easy to remove and is in good enough shape to host more pounding from jump-roping and basketball games.
“The gym floor looks good,” DeRisi said in a recent interview. He’s launching a campaign to raise money to rescue it.
DeRisi said he aims to save the floor for environmental reasons as well as a way to “support continued salvage operations of materials that fall through the ‘cracks’ of the current waste recovery system, and foster a better communication format for future projects.”
Schools Chief Operating Officer Will Clark said there was ample opportunity to salvage materials in September through an open bidding process, and that many items have been salvaged.
DeRisi missed an earlier stage in the demolition when interested parties were invited to bid on salvageable materials that weren’t already snatched up by the school district or city departments. A request for bids on the gym floor and other equipment was posted Sept. 9 on the city’s purchasing website.
The following items were put up for sale: The gym floor, 52 tables, one serving station, 36 desks, 46 chairs and over 200 lockers. Only one firm responded to the offer by the Sept. 23 deadline. Robert Orr & Associates won a bid for 200 lockers at a dollar a piece.
No one bid on the gym floor or the other items.
DeRisi acknowledged the city was able to save many items from the building, including the mural facing Willow Street.
“Everybody’s doing their job,” DeRisi said, “but things still fall between the cracks.”
The building is now in the hands of the demolition contractor, Standard Demolition of Trumbull, also known as Stamford Wrecking. The flooring is slated to be sent to a Dumpster unless DeRisi pays for the material and its removal.
Urbanminers specializes in “deconstructing” buildings, taking it apart and reselling parts that can be reused in other buildings. The company has a warehouse at 30 Manila Ave. in Hamden where a wide range of salvaged materials, from furniture to rescued doors and lumber, are saved.
If it gets gobbled up in the demolition, the floor would take up about 1 1/2 Dumpsters, DeRisi calculated. Rescuing it would save landfill space, and save more maple trees from being cut down and transported across the country, churning through fossil fuels along the way, he argued.
“Every ton of wood that is reused avoids the creation of 60 pounds of green house gases that would have been created to harvest and mill new lumber,” DeRisi said.
DeRisi said he’d have enough room in his warehouse to store the maple flooring, and he has three interested buyers, one of whom is working on a nearby school project. Now he’s trying to raise the money to make it happen.
Removing the floor would take 12 trips in a van with 160 cubic feet capacity, he calculated. It would cost $8,000 to remove, he said.
To pay for the job, DeRisi has launched what he calls the “East Rock 160” campaign. The goal is to get 160 people to buy $50 gift certificates to Urbanminers, which has 9,000 square feet of building material and household goods for sale, he said. The gift certificates would give the company the up-front cash to pay for the removal. DeRisi said he has found a contributor who is willing to match up to $4,000 of gift certificates.
So far, a few recycling enthusiasts have jumped on board. Emails promoting the campaign are making their way around the East Rock neighborhood.
DeRisi said in addition to the gym floor, he also aims to purchase as well as 40 pieces of capstone from perimeter walls, 100 more lockers and “about 50 running feet of lab table tops.”
The lab tables were not put up for sale in September along with the other items. School COO Clark said the countertops “cannot be released” due to their chemical makeup. “Even if we wanted to, we cannot release these items by law.”
Clark did not provide an inventory of what items were salvaged from the school as of press time. He did provide an outline of the salvaging process in a building slated for demolition:
First, he said, the Board of Education salvages what it can from the building, including furniture, computers and phones that could be used in the swing space where the school will be housed. Other items may be used in other schools, including: “athletic items (backboards, equipment, pads, etc.), food items (coolers, ovens, etc.), security cameras, computer wiring, electric panels, fire alarm panels, energy monitoring panels, phones, lockers, furniture, art, etc.,” Clark wrote in an email.
“This is a pretty thorough process,” he said.
Remaining materials are offered to other city departments, Clark said. In the case of the East Rock school, the parks department “salvaged quite a few items for use in their programs.”
After that, the city posted remaining items on the purchasing department website, as described above.
“We did not get a huge response,” Clark noted.
Clark added that in making bids on the demolition, contractors factor in the resale price of remaining materials in the building. That lowers the costs of the bids, Clark said.
Standard Demolition was the lowest of nine bidders on the project, according to Carolina Cudemus, project manager for the site. Cudemus works for Gilbane, which manages the city’s school construction program. R2D is the construction manager for the site. Standard Demolition has a $2.8 million subcontract for abatement and demolition of the school, Cudemus said.
Cudemus said right now, the school is going through abatement, which will include removing asbestos-laden tiles from the floors. The building needs a clean bill of health before being demolished. Cudemus estimated the whole process will take four to five months, based on her experience with the Hill Central Music Academy.
After demolition is completed in April or May, the new school is scheduled to rise in time to welcome students in the fall of 2012, she said.