Repairs to Bristol's Colt School take unexpected turn

Posted 8/31/17

A project to repair the marble steps outside the grand Colt School on Hope Street is becoming more of a rebuild than a repair.

Workers have discovered the structure beneath the steps is badly …

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Repairs to Bristol's Colt School take unexpected turn

Posted

A project to repair the marble steps outside the grand Colt School on Hope Street is becoming more of a rebuild than a repair.

Workers have discovered the structure beneath the steps is badly eroded and must be replaced.

“The support structure worked for 100 years, but there are some serious issues,” said George Simmons, director of facilities for the Bristol Warren Regional School District. “We have to rebuild the support structure, which was not expected. We expected to do some repairs, but not like this.”

The district originally hired the firm Alpha Omega, which has worked on repairs to post offices, schools and public buildings in Rhode Island, to remove, repair and replace the steps and walkway leading to the Hope Street entrance of the Colt building. Workers did just that, removing the marble walkway and lifting the marble steps one by one, marking their original location, and placing them in the grass beside the walkway.

What they found beneath was a surprise.

The blocks and bricks supporting the marble facade are crumbling, in some cases falling to dust.

“We need to build a new support structure,” Mr. Simmons said.

So work is on hold while engineers design a solution. The final structure is expected to be a combination of concrete with a brick overlay in some areas.

When the structure is built, the original marble steps will be put back into place.

That is not the case with the marble walkway, which was too cracked and damaged to be saved. Its pieces were hauled away by the Town of Bristol, and a new marble walkway will be installed in its place.

The delay and additional work will push back the original construction timeline two to three weeks, meaning it should finish by the end of September.

Repairs to the building are being funded mostly by the Colt Fund, a fund created to pay for repairs and maintenance of the building after it was built and given to the Town of Bristol by Samuel Pomeroy Colt in 1908.

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