As the great modern day philosopher, Yogi Berra, once said, “It's deja vu all over again.” The literal French translation of “deja vu” is “already seen”. I sometimes feel as I try to write these regular reports that I have already written it. As I hinted at, perhaps we are doing them too often. In these strange times when activities around the building and grounds are so limited, the property situation is not particularly dynamic. A quarterly report might serve just fine. I can dream! In any case here we go again. Please excuse any old news.
We are into the Sundays of Epiphany. The decorations for the Christmas season have been taken down and stored. We are moving on to the next topic. It all seems nearly surreal given we have not been in the building to experience the season up close and personal. Streaming, Zoom, Facebook … whatever … just does not do it for me compared to the actual sensations of being there in the building with our Holy Trinity family. Alas … this is not our current reality, so we can only do our best to do what needs to be done to have our facility ready for normalcy when it returns.
Over the past year or more the Property Team has been working to resolve some fire code issues identified in routine inspections by the Newington Fire Department and also as a result of the lightning strike damage earlier this year that destroyed portions of the fire alarm system. Most of the routine inspection issues are very straight-forward and have been resolved. Others involving fire door operation have been more of a challenge, but we continue to work to resolve them. Of course, replacement of the fire alarm system is a major task for our fire alarm system contractor. This work is in progress and will continue for several weeks or more. I assume that the Town of Newington will not allow us to return the building to normal use until the new fire alarm system is completed and tested. To the extent that we can control the completion time frame, the objective is to keep the fire alarm system work from becoming the critical path to getting back to normal building use. A simple explanation of “critical path” is in this example. If we knew for certain that we could open the building for normal use eight weeks from today (purely hypothetical for purposes of illustration), a fire alarm system completion time of eight weeks or more would put this work on the critical path to normal building use. Hopefully, this can be avoided, and we will have schedule flexibility to get things done without delaying return to normalcy.
As always, I wish to thank all of the property team volunteers who have continued to do the various tasks, large and small, needed to keep our property safe and ready for use.
David Mercer, Property Team Leader