Portions of the hardwood floor in Cleveland High School’s new $11 million Raider Arena recently “popped out” and the floor is being repaired, Russ Dyer, the newly-appointed director of Cleveland City Schools, confirmed Tuesday morning.
“On a very hot weekend, and we’ve had a lot of them lately, in the middle of the floor a few boards did pop out and get out of place,” Dyer said in a telephone interview. “Hal (Taylor, director of maintenance for Cleveland City Schools) and his team got to work on that. They used weights to get the floor back to where it should be.”
Dyer added that work is still being done on “one small section of the floor" and that only about 2 percent was actually affected.
“Ninety-eight percent of the floor is OK,” he said. “They are working on one small section. There is a slight possibility the company that installed the floor may have to do some minor work, but that it should not be anything major. Hal believes the floor will take care of itself.”
Originally, it was believed the air conditioning in the building had been shut off during the TSSAA-mandated “dead period” between June 15 and July 8 when no athletic activity was allowed.
Dyer debunked that notion.
“We have an energy management system in our schools to save on air conditioning, heating, water and those types of things,” he said. “The AC was never turned off. All of our AC units are maintained by a computerized master control that alerts us when the temperature drops or gets too hot.
“While I am not an expert on wood flooring, my assumption is that the floor needs a certain temperature setting to keep it at a pristine position. If that temperature is not maintained, something could cause issues for the floor.
“It’s a special type floor that requires a certain temperature range; we’re aware of that and have to keep an eye it.”
Ashley Byerly, administrative assistant to the director, said the temperature range is from 72 to 80 degrees with 50 percent humidity.
When asked what the temperature range was when the flooring “popped out,” Byerly said, “I have no idea what it got to.”
Taylor discovered the problem.
He was on vacation during the dead period, came back to work the Monday after and was in the building by 7 a.m.
“We caught it very early,” he said. “The problem area was dead-center on the court. Now we have about a 4-foot line, maybe a couple inches wide, that is still protruding. The rest has already popped back down into place. We have just that one little ridge left and we’re going to give it a couple more weeks.
“If we still have a problem, we can either sand the ridge off and coat the affected area or have a flooring company come in and actually replace some boards.”
Taylor explained the type of flooring and how it was installed makes it “special,” as Dyer said.
“It’s not an old-fashioned basketball floor,” he said. “It’s an advanced floating floor system with expansion joints, which were closed and caused the floor to start popping up. That lent itself to the floor swelling and then coming back down.
“Center court is a first-grade maple. The outer court is third-grade and better. It’s much nicer than a traditional basketball court in an older gym without air conditioning. The floor is designed for climate control.”
When it comes to climate control, Taylor’s team has “learned a valuable lesson” in maintaining the integrity of the floor.
Humidity, not temperature, is now the key component in the procedure of maintaining the floor.
“We know humidity is more important than the air conditioning,” Taylor said. “It’s the controlling factor. Fifty percent is the mark.”
When the floor “popped out” the temperature inside the building Taylor climbed to about 83 or 85 degrees, Taylor surmised. The humidity reached 60 percent. Had Taylor been another week returning from vacation and the humidity had soared to 70 percent, of possibly more, the floor would have continued to push up forcing the wood to further expand.
“That’s the valuable lesson we learned. It wasn’t something anybody told us to do. Before, the energy manager was trying to save money. The problem was that all the information wasn’t being relayed to everybody. It was not one person’s fault; we were still coming out of construction, we still had a phase for getting used to the building.
“We had a lot of minor things to work out with the AC and climate change. We learned our lesson before real damage was done and certainly believe we can prevent this from happening again.”
Meanwhile, the gym can be used for athletics. The Lady Blue Raiders have been practicing in the gym and will host their first home match on Thursday when they host Baylor.
“We can set it up for one or two courts,” Taylor said. “That’s not a problem.”
The first competitive event schedule for the new gym is on Aug. 18 when the Lady Raiders’ volleyball teams will host Baylor. While the old gym was padlocked and under construction, Cleveland was forced to play its home basketball games at Cleveland Middle School.
Cleveland’s 50-year-old Raider Dome was condemned and closed in December 2013 due to a poor structural analysis – wide cracks clearly visible on the gym walls – and workers demolished the facility in the summer of 2014.
Construction on the new building began in November 2014 and was originally scheduled to be completed in February 2015. However, the school wasn’t able to have a grand opening until this past April.
(Reach Larry Fleming at larryfleming44@gmail.com and on Twitter @larryfleming44)