The replacement Richard McBride Elementary School is still on track to be finished by the end of this year.
Dave Crowe, director of capital projects for the New Westminster school district, gave an update on the ongoing construction project at the school board’s operations committee meeting Feb. 9.
He told trustees the project is continuing to proceed on time and on target to meet its budget, which comes in just shy of $35 million. He noted the construction taking place now – as the steel structure rises on the Richmond Street site behind the existing school building – is at the stage where it’s starting to generate attention.
The current schedule calls for the steel structure, including decking, to be finished by the first week of March, with the roof completed by mid-April. Exterior building envelope work is projected to be done by the end of August and interior finishes by December, with the new school move-in ready by mid-December this year.
“The neat thing about it is, you’ll notice we’re actually starting to talk about preparation for roofing and rough-ins for electrical and mechanical, and also installation of steel stud,” Crowe said. “So it’s really starting to become a building.”
Crowe said his team had anticipated there could be some negative impacts on supply chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but so far that has not proven to be the case.
That said, he noted the project team is continuing to plan its work well into the future to help mitigate against any possible COVID-19 impacts down the road. They’re already starting to look at what work may be done in the months of June, July and August when school is not in session.
“We are looking a lot further ahead than probably we traditionally would on a project like this,” he said.
TRAFFIC TROUBLES EASING
Crowe also addressed the issue of traffic congestion around the school site, which had been raised by trustee Mary Lalji at a previous meeting.
He said the district has worked with the contractor, Heatherbrae Builders, to ensure that deliveries and other construction-related traffic are kept to a minimum during peak traffic periods at the beginning and the end of the school day. He noted traffic troubles around the Sapperton school had been exacerbated by closures of East Columbia Street related to redevelopment of the hospital.
“Most of the traffic congestion issues that we had were really driven by the work that’s going on down in the Royal Columbian Hospital area, and it was adding a considerable amount of traffic to Richmond Street, which wasn’t helping our situation,” he said, adding that the current traffic conditions are not perfect but have definitely improved.
Crowe said the McBride replacement continues to be one of the district’s success stories in a challenging year.
“The project really, quite frankly, at this point in time is textbook delivery,” he said.
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