Roof Collapse

The last 72 hours at the food bank have been quite hectic. During Tuesday night’s monsoon storm we had two 25’ X 40’ sections of our warehouse ceiling collapse. The collapse also severed a major sprinkler system water line. The result was water in the building from both the storm and the broken sprinkler lines. When we arrived on-site around 11:30 PM the facility was also without power. After power was restored at 2:00 AM we were able to begin to assess the damage and start the massive clean up process. St Mary’s staff rose to the occasion, grabbing mops and squeegees to begin cleaning. Imagine every pallet of food in the facility that sat on the ground had to be relocated so excess water could be removed. We had tremendous support from the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office and Perryvale Prison who both sent teams of inmates to assist in the process. By end of day on Wednesday the majority of the facility was back in good shape. However, we still have our two new massive unwanted “skylights”.

The roof engineers completed their evaluation on Thursday and gave us the okay to open up the facility for food distribution on Friday. The repair work will take place once the design has been completed by the roofing engineers. It could be 10 days to two weeks before the roof is fully repaired. We were unable to distribute or receive food at all on Wednesday. Thanks go out to our sister food banks in the valley including Westside, Desert Mission and United, who stepped up to help cover the short term needs of our agencies yesterday. With a lot of hard work our goal is to be fully operational on Friday. While we do have insurance, we have not been able to fully determine the level of loss recovery we can expect. We not only have experienced the damage to the building and loss of food, but we also had water damage in our office area. The office damage is everything from brochures and signage to computer PCs which tie into our network.

A special thank you goes out to Norm Gold, Ben Bradley, Don Anderson and Paul Kwan. These four gentlemen, who are on the staff at St Mary’s, arrived on scene Tuesday night around 10 PM and worked through the day on Wednesday. They went without sleep for 40 plus hours working to make sure the food bank got back on its feet as quickly as possible. Thanks guys for really going “Above and Beyond” the call of duty.