Construction has been going around the perimeter of the Polk County Government Center building. The construction is happening due to moisture infiltrating the exterior membrane of the building’s foundation into one of the office walls on the building’s lower level after a storm in June.
After a rainstorm that occurred at the end of June, workers in the southwest corner of the Government Center reported that water was leaking into the building and some employees’ offices due to a foundation leak. After County Administrator Chuck Whiting reported this to the Polk County board of commissioners, they hired Palmer Masonry and Concrete LLC to assess and repair the foundation for $44,640. Upon further assessment of the leakage in the foundation, they found that the problem was more extensive than they initially realized. “After we accessed the problem, we realized that we were having infiltration from the exterior, through the membrane by the foundation. The only way to fix that issue was to excavate around the exterior to determine where the problem was and how extensive it was,” Polk County Assistant Facilities Director Rick Langlois explained. “At that time, we decided that we had to go pretty extensively around the exterior of the building because the original membrane was allowing water to enter the granite, which then transferred into the interior of the building.” Langlois said that they first started looking in the office that had the leak, where they removed the wall coverings to find the source of the water leak, which they found was from the exterior wall of the masonry. With that, they began excavating around the building to see where the problem was coming from.
Construction and the excavation process of the building began last week, where they stripped down the wall and began the process of drying the room out. They then started working on the exterior of the building, where they removed the old membrane and cleaned the granite before attaching a new foundation membrane with a waterproof seal to prevent any more water from seeping in when they started working on the inside of the building. The other part of the excavation process is creating a drain field around the building that will be backfilled with pea rock and drain tile to move water away from the building to multiple sump areas placed around the building, which will cause the water to seep back into the ground. “They’re going to start backfilling with pea rock, and there’s going to be drain tile put in there, so any water that would be along the foundation in the future will be taken away from the building into sump barrels,” Langlois explained, “So, the all the water will run away from the building because it’s grated to do so.” Langlois explained that due to the ground being so saturated from the melted snow and previous storms over the spring and beginning of June, the water had nowhere to go other than into the building’s foundation, which leaked into the office wall.
Langlois says that the exterior work should be finished by the end of the week and that the building is currently waterproof, so even if there is a rain event, no more water will seep into the building. When that finishes, he and the building’s facility maintenance team will go into the offices adjacent to the office that had the water issue to do assessments to see how far the water may have migrated in either direction. Langlois predicts they will complete their work by the end of the month. “I would say the inside work would take about two to three weeks. We want to strip out all of the areas that had moisture in them, and we don’t know how far that goes yet,” Langlois explained. “Then the process will be to get rid of the wet materials then dry the area. When we’re satisfied that everything is dry and buttoned up, we’ll start putting new sheetrock and insulation back together.” Langlois mentioned this will project will be a lifetime fix and take care of any water issues that the Center may have in the future with it designed to keep the moisture away from the building’s foundation.
Pictures of the construction on the Polk County Government Center can be seen below.
