There’s a building at Edmonton’s waste management site, the one where the composter is kept, that’s in danger of collapsing.
The Aeration Hall Building is its official name, and the report going to council’s utilities committee says it poses “significant and imminent risk.”
The roof may cave in.
“It looks like the roof has deteriorated way faster than we had thought,” Coun. Ben Henderson said Tuesday.
“That creates, particularly, concerns in terms of snow load.
“For safety reasons, we felt we needed to stop using it. We couldn’t take the risk.”
Scroll down to read the full report to the utilities committee.
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The city will have to close the building to keep contractors and staff out in case it collapses. How much this will end up costing the city, officials don’t know. The committee will discuss those possibilities Tuesday afternoon.
Henderson, who is the chair of the utilities committee, was told of the problem shortly after the election, and said he doesn’t know how long before that city staff saw it as a problem.
The building dates back to the 1980s and was last inspected two years ago.
“We don’t know if something was off in those assessments or whether or not it just deteriorated very rapidly.”
“A composter is a kind of complex place in terms of the gasses in the air and heat and those sorts of things,” Henderson said. “So, it’s possible that it’s just rapid deterioration. It is a very old building.”
This means material will have to go to the landfill instead, the report to committee said.
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“The good news is: over the winter, we have a lot less compost than we do in the summertime,” Henderson said.
“This is not a bad time to be dealing with it.”
The report also spells out a slight change in the utility rates citizens will be charged. The fees for 2018 garbage collection now will increase by $1.03 a month, down from the original projected increase of $1.85 a month.
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That means a monthly bill for a single-family home will come in at $45.93. This comes from a review in June when councillors were told the city only diverts slightly more than half of what heads to the landfill.
The target has been 90 per cent, but the city has never reached that goal.
Waste Services 2018 Supplemental Operating Budget Adjustment by Anonymous TdomnV9OD4 on Scribd