When Petersburg Parks and Recreation Director Stephanie Payne walked into the aquatic center women’s locker room on July 17, the air smelled like concrete dust, and the regular locker room partitions and benches had been taken out to make way for construction equipment.
She pointed out the several massive holes in the floor. Rebar poked out of the holes, alongside the remnants of the floor’s heating system. Among the rubble and dirt were dusty grey pipes.
Construction crews had cut through eight inches of concrete flooring to get to the sewer lines beneath the building.
“We kept getting the smell of urine,” Payne explained, standing near one of the holes. Then, there were plumbing problems in the unisex locker room.
When Petersburg’s wastewater department came to look at the plumbing, they immediately found issues. In the men’s locker room, the pipes were filled with rocks. In the women’s locker room, there were big gaps between where pipes should have connected.
“It just started becoming very clear to us that things are separating, things are settling and pulling everything away, and we really started to ramp up all of our discussions about what to do,” Payne said.
It’s a problem Parks and Rec has been working on for three years.
“This facility is now 20 years old this year,” she said. “We’ve heard from other people, plumbers and things, ‘Wow, you got by pretty good. Usually, it fails sooner than that.” I’m just like, ‘Really? That should not be the case. That shouldn’t be the case at all.’”
The aquatic center has been closed since May. So far, construction crews have dug into the floor in the women’s and unisex locker rooms, and will turn to the men’s locker room next. During construction, they found additional issues with the plumbing and did two extra cuts in the floor of the women’s locker room.
In a follow-up email, Payne wrote that despite the additional work, “So far, the added expenses have not grown much in terms of project magnitude.” The final bid for the project was $1.1 million.
Some of those costs will be partially reimbursed by a school capital improvement project from the state. The state considers the building a partial school facility, and the borough estimates receiving roughly $540,000 for the project.
While the construction has been focused on the locker rooms, the work has impacted other parts of the building.
In 2023, Parks and Rec repaired the community gym. Payne said during that project, they accidentally cut through a power conduit that wasn’t in the floor plans. To prevent that from happening during this project, they turn off the power every time construction crews are cutting concrete.
“When we do lose power, because our main internet hub is in the aquatic center, in the office, there goes our internet,” said Payne. “It’s very dicey as to whether we’re going to have power from one day to the next, and therefore internet from one day to the next.”
Parks and Rec also can’t have the pool’s HVAC system on when they’re cutting concrete, which they need to keep moisture down from the pool. That means right now, the pools are drained.
It will be a while before the locker rooms are fixed and re-plumbed, but Payne hopes the pools can safely re-open once the construction crew is done cutting into the floors.
Once it’s safe to refill the pools, she said they’ll route swimmers to the locker rooms on the gymnasium side of the community center.
“I mean, they’re not aquatic locker rooms,” she said. “They’re not made for it, and they’re much smaller.”
But, if patrons are patient, she said they’ll be able to make it work.
She said she knows that people are anxiously waiting for the project to wrap up. But, Payne said she needs to make sure the space is safe before patrons can start swimming again.
The estimated construction completion date is August 29. Payne said construction crews will do their best to meet that deadline.
According to the school district calendar, the swim season starts August 5. School starts August 25.
Correction: A previous version of this story said the cost of the project was $1.2 million. The accepted bid was $1.1 million.
