Mansfield Middle School’s New $1.2 Million Roof is Leaking

MANSFIELD — The Mans­field Mid­dle School’s new $1.2 mil­lion roof is leak­ing, accord­ing to town May­or Anto­nia Moran.

These leaks have been severe enough to cause sub­stan­tial dam­age to the inte­ri­or of the build­ing. “I have seen pho­tos inside the school of soaked ceil­ing tiles and filled buck­ets of water on the ground,” said Moran.

“What [the school] expe­ri­enced last week was far beyond the leak here or there. It was kind of a dis­as­ter zone cri­sis sit­u­a­tion. I don’t think we can over­state that there were some real prob­lems we can’t have repli­cat­ed in the future,” said town man­ag­er Ryan Aylesworth dur­ing a Mans­field Mid­dle School roof com­mit­tee meeting.

The areas that are leak­ing have had min­i­mal effects on the stu­dents. “There may have been one class­room that had a leak, but most­ly, the kids weren’t even aware of it,” adding “It was han­dled dis­crete­ly and quick­ly,” accord­ing to Moran.

The town will not have to pay to repair these dam­ages. “We are with­in the war­ran­ty peri­od,” Moran said in a town coun­cil meet­ing, “Every­thing that was dam­aged will be replaced. We will not have to pay for that. This is clear­ly the con­trac­tor’s responsibility.”

Moran made it clear, though, that the frus­trat­ing part of this issue for the town is that the new roof was intend­ed to fix this exact prob­lem: leaking.

“We built this new roof, which cost mil­lions of dol­lars, to fix the leak­ing prob­lem with the old roof, and now we have the same issue again,” said Moran.

In a town coun­cil meet­ing, Moran added, “Frankly, I found this aston­ish­ing after we spent $1.2 mil­lion on a new roof and made it very clear that the town was not going to pay one more pen­ny until every­thing was rec­ti­fied and this would not hap­pen again.”

Cur­rent­ly, there are three main prob­lem areas with­in the school that are deal­ing with leaks, and work has been done to mit­i­gate the leak­ing. How­ev­er, no per­ma­nent fix has been made yet, said Allen Cor­son, the town’s facil­i­ties direc­tor, dur­ing the roof com­mit­tee meeting.

The leaks stemmed from an issue with debris find­ing its way into the drain pipes and gut­ter sys­tem on the roof.

“The debris that was in the drain pipes, it appears, would have accu­mu­lat­ed over a con­sid­er­able peri­od of time, and it reached a tip­ping point that caused the sep­tic to back up and back up into the build­ing,” said Aylesworth dur­ing the town coun­cil meet­ing. Aylesworth also acknowl­edged the recent tor­ren­tial rain­fall that the town has been expe­ri­enc­ing as a cause of this leaking.

“This roof is a very dif­fer­ent type of drain­ing sys­tem than many roofs we see when it comes to a long lin­ear type of gut­ter sys­tem that finds its way to one loca­tion,” said Paul Jor­gensen, an archi­tect on the project at the roof com­mit­tee meet­ing. Jor­gensen also added, “It’s not uncom­mon for a brand-new roof to
have a leak here or there when it’s first put on.”

Accord­ing to the roof com­mit­tee meet­ing, Cor­son and Jor­gensen are opti­mistic about find­ing per­ma­nent solu­tions to alle­vi­ate the school’s drainage problem.

Local records indi­cate the roof was con­tract­ed by The Impe­r­i­al Com­pa­ny Restora­tion Con­trac­tor Inc. in 2021.