Deconstruction has begun on the Pearson wing of the old New Westminster Secondary School.
New Westminster school trustees heard an update on the NWSS demolition project at their operations committee meeting Tuesday, April 11.
Dave Crowe, the district's director of capital projects, said the demolition project is now more than 40 per cent complete. He said the entire project should be finished by the end of the year, or possibly early in 2024 if any other issues arise.
Right now, however, he said work is proceeding well.
"Things are going very, very well; we’re actually picking up some lost time that we had a couple of months ago," he said.
The project has required an extensive amount of hazardous materials abatement, specifically asbestos, and crews are nearly finished that abatement work in the Pearson wing. They're now starting physical deconstruction of that wing while beginning the hazardous materials abatement work in the Massey wing, Crowe noted.
Before the hazardous materials abatement started, Crowe said, the contractor was able to remove a significant amount of school furnishings — including desks, lockers and other furniture and equipment — for repurposing. Those went to other schools and other school districts that were in "desperate need" of the furnishings.
All told, he said, about 95 per cent of those furnishings were salvaged to be repurposed.
Likewise, he noted, the contractor is focused on recycling as many construction materials as possible as the physical demolition of the building begins. They're in the process now of salvaging wood beams, which are heading off to points in Canada and the U.S. to be reused.
“It’s nice to see them being repurposed," Crowe noted.
Future plans: What lies ahead for the old NWSS site?
Ultimately, the land currently occupied by the old school will become a memorial park dedicated to historic uses of the site.
A previous report to school board, in October 2020, laid out plans for the future memorial park that will occupy the land where the old school now sits. That park, which is planned to be built in phases over the next three years, will include greenery, pathways and a number of tributes — by way of art and signage — to the original uses of the land.
The current school, which opened in 1949, sits on a cemetery that was used between 1860 and 1920 as a potter's field where bodies of the poor, prisoners, stillborn babies and patients from Woodlands and Essondale (which later became Riverview) were buried. The land was also used by Chinese, Sikh and Indigenous communities to bury their dead.
The first phase of work on the memorial park comes with budget of $1 million.
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