This continues to be an unusual and challenging year for the property team.
The virus issue has limited our volunteer participation through most of this year's outdoor growing season, but we have been able to keep up with most of the outside work. In recent weeks many of our regular volunteers have begun to come back on a regular basis and our outside work accomplishments are returning to normal.
When you have an opportunity to drop by the church, please take note. We have managed to keep up with the routine mowing and trimming, the gardens and plantings, shrubs, tree trimming and prunning. A tree and selected bushes have been removed. Extensive clearing of brush and other growth has been completed on the property perimeter. A big job, removal of a large, dead elm tree near our entry driveway, remains. We hope to hire a tree removal professional for that one before winter. Each year some inevitable cracks appear in our parking lot and driveways, and the ubiquitous weed growth appears through the cracks. We plan to get these cracks cleaned and sealed before winter.
If you are one of those Holy Trinity folks who sometimes need to carry trash bags out to our trash bins beside the storage shed, I hope you have noticed it is much easier to lift the heavy lids of the trash bins. You can thank Bob Hollister, Stuart and Gisela Wimple for installing hydraulic lift cylinders on the lids and adding reinforcement to the edges of the lids. We have experienced some growing pains with the lifters, but they generally work well. We will get the kinks worked out.
Given the limited use of our building facilities, property team work inside the building has also been limited, but recent storm power-surge issues experienced at the church in July have introduced some new challenges. We are actively working with several contractors with a goal of replacing our existing fire alarm system that was damaged in the July storm and for which replacement parts are no longer available. This work will be ongoing into the fall. We have also been involved directly and indirectly in various ways supporting resolutions to other storm surge related equipment damage at the church and supporting an insurance claim for this damage.
We have recently been working with two different electricians to resolve questions and issues concerning our main electrical control panel in the basement that provides electrical power to all parts of the building. In July two circuit breakers in this electrical panel were found to have failed significantly and were replaced. It is unlikely that this problem was caused by the storm, but it was discovered as part of our evaluation of storm damage to components powered from this panel.These circuit breakers impacted lighting and wall outlets in the basement, but also several outlets in the conference room and one in the kitchen. Both of our refrigerators lost power for several days. It appears that one of these refrigerators is no longer useable.
Evaluation of the breaker panel also identified some form and fit issues with circuit breakers in the panel that need to be resolved at some point. None of these panel issues are related to the July storm, but we have investigated adding surge protection to this breaker panel to minimize the possibility of similar power surge problems in the future. This could involve replacement of, or significant modifications to, the existing panel.
As part of our ongoing work to resolve concerns identified by the Newington fire department last year, we have been working to provide steps at three emergency exit door locations. As is often the case for our older building, these projects sometimes lead to additional issues that we would not have known about had we not been pursuing unrelated work. In this particular case we have discovered quite a bit of rotten, water-damaged wood near ground level in the vicinity of the wiggle room emergency exit door. We are working to resolve this issue. As I am fond of saying because it's so true in the area of property matters, "The Beat Goes On." There is always something to do even if we don't know what it is yet!
Dave Mercer, Property Team Leader