Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
In quite the opposite of a packed house, the CHS auditorium awaits the next stage of construction.
A worker from Wellens Farwell Construction frames a new wall in a south hallway at the junior-senior high school Monday.
Seats in the Colfax High School auditorium were cleared out in two days last week to begin the school remodeling project. Remaining on the floor were sides of chairs which were still connected to wires for aisle lighting. An electrician was slated to take those out Tuesday.
Next, the six-man, full-time crew from Wellens Farwell Construction of Enterprise, Ore., moved to the old wood shop to prepare the area to be turned into a STEAM lab, a classroom and the junior high commons area, according to Jason Ransdall, project superintendent for the contractor.
In the auditorium, after the electricians complete their work, subcontractor Summit Environmental of Hayden, Idaho, will begin asbestos removal from the floors. They will also take out asbestos in classrooms for zone one of the project, which encompasses the south end of the junior/senior high school building. This is expected to last two weeks.
As for the rows of seats torn out of the auditorium, most went to the Whitman County Transfer Station, which will send them to Sutton Salvage in Lewiston, which ships them to a scrap yard in Burbank, Wash. for the metal to be melted down.
Some of the 1960 seats went elsewhere.
Josh Alvarez, on the construction crew, from LaGrande, took four auditorium seats home last weekend.
"We put them in our living room. We watched '8 Seconds'," said Alvarez, outside the wood shop room about to be worked on Monday morning.
Once the school district vacated the auditorium, what remained was the property of the construction company.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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