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The brick structure on Wallace State Community College’s seven-story health building is in critical condition, college officials and engineers say.

The two-year college is preparing to spend $2.1 million to reclad the brick exterior of the 50,000-square-foot Bevill Building that houses most of the school’s allied health programs. It’s a measure school officials say is necessary due to evidence of brick failure, a potentially dangerous problem if left unrepaired.

Additionally, the school expects to spend an additional $1.6 million to repair interior damage to the building, which cost $3.4 million to build in 1988.

To make matters worse, school officials believe similar steps may have to be taken to repair the college’s crown jewel, the James C. Bailey Center, a 12-story tower that serves as the centerpiece of the campus.

For now, the school is putting off repairs of the Bailey Center. Recladding that building’s bricks is expected to cost about $7 million.

“First we have to find the money,” Hawsey said about repairing the Bailey Center.

She said she expects work on this larger building to be more costly and time consuming than the Bevill Building repairs because of its magnitude. Also she said she hopes school officials learn lessons from the Bevill Building repairs it can use when it tackles the Bailey Center’s problems.

“I’m sure we have much to learn when the bricks come off,” she said.

To pay for the Bevill Building repairs, Wallace State is using its share of a $1.07 billion state school construction bond issue — $2.7 million.

“We had other plans for that,” Hawsey said. “There are other renovations on campus that really needed to occur.”

<h1>THE PROBLEM</h1>

Officials believe the problems with both buildings are a result of poor design and construction methods used when the Bevill Building was erected in 1988 and when the Bailey Center was constructed seven years later.

The issue, according to a report by Barnett Jones Wilson, LLC, the Pell City-based structural engineering firm hired by Wallace State to evaluate the severity of the buildings’ damage, is the absence of adequate verticalcontrol in their design and construction.

According to the report, signs of brick failure are showing up on the buildings in the form of “spalling of brick and bulging of brick walls.”

Hawsey said, “We knew there were problems with the brick cladding, but we did not realize the extent of the problem until the last year.”

Hawsey said a probe of the buildings performed this year by Williamson & Associates, an Atlanta-based architecture and design firm, found the buildings lacked adequate expansion joints.

“They came in and did probes of the building to not only see the problems on the surface, but what existed behind the buildings. We found that the building externally is at the point of structural failure,” Hawsey said.

The lack of adequate expansion joints has forced lower portions of the brick wall to support part of the building’s weight, a job for which it is not designed, officials said.

“What happened was the expansion joints that should have been included in the design process were nonexistent or inadequate, and so you can see classic textbook examples of failure in this building as a result of not adding those,” Hawsey said.

<h1>UNDER THE SURFACE</h1>

Phillip Studdard, the college’s director of plant operations, said an examination of the building unearthed other problems. These included too few brick ties, which are used to support the brick structure, and the absence of proper weep holes, passages added to allow unwanted moisture behind the bricks to escape.

“We even found the windows are flashed in improperly,” Studdard said.

Hawsey added that another problem found was a lack of water proofing.

“What they found behind the brick is water proofing and sheathing that you expect to be installed to prevent moisture from coming into the building was non-existent,” she said.

Furthermore, Hawsey said findings showed the subsequent intrusion of water had caused metal studs supporting the bricks to corrode to the point they were sheared off, increasing the pressure on the bricks below.

“We’ve had water intrusion there for quite a long time,” Studdard said.

The study was conducted after tell-tale signs of building problems were found, including stairstep cracks in the wall and brick spalling. Also discovered during the probing process was a 30-pound piece of concrete that had fallen from the building.

“We have evidence throughout the building that not only were the design processes flawed, but construction processes were flawed also,” Hawsey said.

The upcoming work will not be the first major renovations done on the Bevill Building.

“We’ve spent about a million dollars on that in the last four years,” she said. Among repairs was the installation of a new roof that cost $700,000 and a $265,000 renovation of the building’s seventh floor that Hawsey said was “virtually ruined” by water intrusion.

Also, she said some work on the building may have been required shortly after it was built.

“When we started digging through old records, some issues appeared in the first year it was inhabited,” Hawsey said.

Also, she said saw cuts that were evident on the building’s brick walls may have been made to alleviate the problem.

<h1>WHO BUILT IT?</h1>

Nearen Construction of Cullman built the Bevill Building. President Thomas Ross said he is confident the building was constructed according to the architect’s design.

Also, Ross said, “Times change. People have gotten more sophisticated on expansion joints and expansion materials.”

The Barnett, Jones, Wilson, LLC report says the Bevill Building’s failures are “text book examples of failures of brick on concrete frames without adequate vertical control.” The report goes on to say “The research for these failures was done in the late ‘60s and started appearing in publications and text books in the ‘70s.”

“It’s very clear in the report that architects had begun to identify the problems associated with these types of failures,” Hawsey said. “By the time this building was designed and constructed any architect or any construction firm would have known there were specific measurements with regard to adequate expansion joints that should have been followed. And they weren’t on these buildings, and that’s obvious from the design drawings.”

Construction of the Bailey Center, Hawsey said, was completed by Dunn Construction of Birmingham. President R. Craig Fleming could not be reached for comment.

Also unable to be reached was Samuel F. Donze of Birmingham, the architect for construction of both buildings. Donze’s phone number provided on a Web site list of state registered architects was disconnected.

Hawsey said in addition to design, architects have an additional responsibility to act as “the clerk of the work.” She said this includes making sure construction proceeds according to plans.

Hawsey said the school did not hire a construction manager on this project. Construction managers, she said, protect the owner’s interest.

“They can make sure things are conducted according to the specifications according to code and that the owner’s interest in the property is protected,” she said.

Hawsey does not know why a construction manager was not hired.

“Maybe it wasn’t a common practice in 1988,” she said, adding that the problems the college is currently experiencing show why hiring a manager is crucial in construction.

Hawsey said the school has contacted a law firm about the matter.

“We’ve gathered the records for a law firm to take a look at to see if we have any legal remedy,” she said. She declined to reveal which law firm is handling the case.

Ross, president of Nearen Construction, said he has not been informed of the Bevill Building’s problems.

<h1>PROTECTING STUDENTS</h1>

To make sure the Bevill Building’s inhabitants are kept safe, the school took immediate measures after learning the extent of the building’s problems.

Included among these steps was testing for mold to make sure it had not intruded into the building. Hawsey said tests revealed no presence of mold.

Other actions taken included shoring the lower part of the building, installing overhead protection around the building’s exits and placing a protective barrier around the building to keep people away from the structure.

Charles Hill, a Wallace State student studying computer science, said these safety measures have caused inconvenience and a “pain on the eyes.”

Hawsey said a greater inconvenience will be created when the building’s repair work begins.

Because the building’s bricks will be reclad one side of the building at a time, inhabitants will be displaced into other rooms within the same building throughout the repair process.

“It will be extremely inconvenient,” Hawsey said.

It also will be extremely difficult to make bricks of the Bevill Building and Bailey Center match their original appearance, according to Hawsey.

“Whenever you go in and replace brick that’s 20 years old, you can’t match the brick exactly,” she said.

The school is working on ways to update appearance of the buildings.

“It’s a challenge,” she said.

Stone Builder of Birmingham was awarded the Bevill Building repair project after outbidding its competitors. The repairs are expected to take about nine months to complete following contract approval by Bradley Byrne, the state’s two-year college chancellor.