GOING INTO SPLINTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 40, 16 August 1944, Page 7

GOING INTO SPLINTS

CITY ENGINEER'S BUILDING

After two years of doubt as to what may be done about the. future civic centre, and also after two years of continuing risk, the City Engineer's building in Mercer Street, condemned as dangerous because of the exten-' sive earthquake damage, is going into splints. Still there are hopes that the civic centre controversy will be shortly determined and the work decided upon "is therefore not of a permanent nature, nothing like the buttressing and bonding of the Town Hall, for instance. The three main brick partitioning walls, across the building, are cracked through, and the western exterior wall is broken away from the Mercer Street frontage wall and from front to back, so that the whole place is in bad shape. The temporary treatment, agreed to by the City Council at its last meeting, will be to strap the building at each partition and at each floor by steel bars anchored to plates on each outside wall (12 sets of bars and plates all told), and to slice back the western gable with a new roof arrangement to do away with the mass of brickwork which just sits there because it is heavy enough and because there has not been a sufficient after-shake to bring it down. It will not be an outstandingly handsome repair job, but the engineering staff will feel better about minor earth shocks when it is done. The cost will be something over a thousand, pounds.