Fate of Houston Middle School discussed at school board meeting

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough School Board heard a report from Chuck Kenley, Vice President of PND Engineers, which was hired along with Burkhart Croft Engineers to assess the viability of rebuilding Houston Middle School.

Houston Middle School shook as hard as any place in the state at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 30, 2018, when the magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Point Mackenzie. The building had been built in 1985 and suffered significant structural damage, resulting in the immediate evacuation of the 93,152 square foot building that had originally served as Houston High School. HMS suffered damage to all three wings, but the most important wing was most severely affected. The gym was held up by structural steel and the administrative wing in between the gym and the classroom wing suffered only minimal damage. The classroom wing was not so lucky.

“The damage was greater so we are recommending that you bring that classroom structure up to a modern code level or tear it down and build new, and we also believe that it would be very expensive probably and involved to bring that classroom up to code,” Kenley said. “Our recommendation right now is to probably tear that part of the building down and replace it.”

The classroom wing suffered out of plane movement of the Concrete Masonry Unit (CMU) corridor walls. The 1982 code that the building adhered to did not require alternating bricks, meaning each brick was stacked one on top of the other parallel to the other cinder blocks. When the building shook, the cinder blocks could not disperse their weight, cracked, broke and fell all throughout the classroom wing of HMS. The wood diaphragm of the roof separated from the CMU shear walls. Widespread substantial damage was found to the non-structural CMU partitions. Kenley recommended a total code upgrade or replacement. Repairing the classroom wing may be even more expensive than rebuilding. The district was presented three possible scenarios to choose. MSBSD will either offer minimum repairs only, repair the gym and administrative wings and replace the entire classroom wing, or tear down and replace the entire school. Kenley addressed a variety of questions about the building structure and the site itself.

“People are saying if you rebuild there aren’t you just asking for more problems because that’s where the earthquake hit,” Board Member Sarah Welton said.

Kenley said that the well-known Castle Mountain fault that runs in the vicinity does not disqualify the site and noted that HHS built with structural steel suffered no major damage.

“You can design a building even though that area has a little higher seismicity,” Kenley said. “We didn’t see any real evidence that it contributed to any of this damage. It was pretty much concentrated at the tops of concrete block walls.”

Contact Frontiersman reporter Tim Rockey at tim.rockey@frontiersman.com.