Atkinson: Cleanup of rec center will take weeks

It could be August before the Admiral Coontz Recreation Center in Hannibal is available again for public functions. That projection was made by Chris Atkinson, director of the Hannibal Parks and Recreation Department, after walking through the armory Wednesday morning.
“I’m going to say it’s going to be at least two, maybe even three weeks before we can feel comfortable that we can allow the public in here. We need to do all the cleaning,” he said, estimating that at the peak of the flood the old armory held five feet of water. “We can clean it off, but if we have no electricity and no gas back here, we can’t allow anybody to be in here.”
Atkinson is thankful that the structure was built with floods in mind.
“The building has been built with bricks to clean off,” he said. “I talked to my maintenance guys. They think it’s just a matter of coming in here with some hoses and cleaning off a lot of the mud before it sets and becomes hard to remove.”
Some walls will need more than a simple hosing.
“We have a few rooms where we’re going to need to replace dry wall and some of the insulation,” said Atkinson. “The recreation supervisor’s office and the room where the driver’s license testing facility was are going to need to have about six feet of the dry wall replaced. For everything else it’s coming in with a hose, some brushes and good old fashioned hard work, and we’ll get this thing washed out as quick as we can. Then we’ll need to look to see if any of the electrical work was damaged when the water was sitting in here. Then we can work on getting the electricity, gas and water reconnected and go from there.”
Atkinson admitted he wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he walked into the building.
“This is my first time going through a flood,” he said. “It’s not as bad as what I’d anticipated, quite frankly. Obviously, it doesn’t look good to the eye, but I was expecting a foot of mud in here and all kinds of weird animals to be stuck in here, so it’s not what I thought.”
The old armory was not the only parks department property to be covered by water. Parks near the Mississippi River and Bear Creek were damaged, too.
“I know the parks that we have off of Warren Barrett Drive, the soccer field and Dulaney Park we’re going to have to reseed those parks,” said Atkinson. “I haven’t checked out Nipper, Kiwanis and Glascock, but I’m guessing the result is going to be the same where the grass is completely dead and we’ll need to go in and replace it.”
Parks department manpower will be divided between the armory and city parks, according to Atkinson.
“We’ll have half the guys working down here at the armory. This is an important building to us, but also Nipper, Kiwanis and Glascock are important parks, especially during these summer months,” he said. “We’ll have guys doing what we can to get all of our parks on the opposite side of the flood wall up and running and then we’ll also have guys working down here to get the armory up and running as soon as possible.”
Atkinson’s preliminary estimate is that the flood caused “several thousand dollars” in damage to parks department property.
“There’s money set aside to maintain buildings. Obviously you don’t expect or anticipate that there’s going to be a large flood event that will maybe consume a large part of that line item in the budget,” he said. “The armory is insured with the FEMA flood insurance plan and there may be some money available to help restore the armory from that avenue.”