HALIFAX – Members of the Sackville Masonic Lodge were surveying the damage to their building alongside structural engineers and an environmental clean-up crew on Monday after their roof collapsed over the weekend.
The lodge’s master, Don MacLeod, said he received a call around 4 p.m. Sunday and initially thought it was a joke.
“When I came in, I tried to open the front door of the lodge and all you could do was walk into the foyer because…you can’t access the lodge room,” MacLeod said.
There’s a visible gap in the roof and the walls are buckling. Photos taken by MacLeod show broken beams and a large amount of snow inside the structure.
(Photos courtesy Don MacLeod, Sackville Masonic Lodge)
“It’s a terrible mess, all our furniture is gone. It might be gone. We don’t know because the roof is on top of everything so it’s hard to see,” he said.
There was nobody inside the building at the time of the collapse, but a rehearsal was scheduled for three hours later and MacLeod estimates 20 people would have been there.”
“We’re just happy that nobody was hurt. We have insurance so things will be okay for us.”
The lodge was one of four commercial roof collapses Halifax firefighters responded to in recent days.
On Sunday, the roof of a vacant building in the Burnside Industrial Park caved in from the weight of the snow and a similar call came in for an auto repair shop on Waverley Road.
Deputy Fire Chief Roy Hollett said these types of calls are new for the fire department and it’s unclear how much of a concern there are at this time.
“The only collapses I’ve seen is during hurricanes when a building collapses but for a snow load, not a common occurrence here at all,” he said.
Hollett advises people to keep an eye and ear out for possible structural problems with their roofs. If anything seems out of place, he advises residents to call a professional engineer to check it out.
“You’ll hear cracks. The roof looks not even,” he said. “The wall is starting to curve, bow out or bow in and if you can see the structural supports twisting, flexing, broken pipes and it just doesn’t look right.”
That’s something the city is already doing with its properties. One of the arenas at Cole Harbour Place was still closed on Monday as crews cleared the roof as a precaution.
Halifax Regional Municipality spokesperson Tiffany Chase says staff have been checking all buildings on a rotation and calling in engineers when needed.
“We have a number of larger buildings with flatter roofs and those would be the ones that we would be watching more regularly,” she said.
“Many people take part in recreation programs and all kinds of things at the buildings that we own and we want to make sure safety is our top priority.”
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