Image
Holes in a roof at San Juan College
Cleanup following last Thursday's hail storm in Farmington is still going on now a week later. They are still tabulating what it will cost to fix the damage on campus at San Juan College, too.

Officials say the storm was really bad. Videos sent to KOB show the hail pounding the campusโ€”starting around pea sized, later growing to golf ball sized.

Maintenance workers at San Juan College said the phones started ringing not long after the hail, each call alerting them to a leaking roof in another building.

Many of the buildings have a white Thermal Plastic Overlay, or TPO, roof. A drop in temperature left the roofing brittle and each piece of hail that hit the roof left a crack. Those cracks let rain leak in and to the classrooms below.

The next hours and days involved a lot of fans and buckets to catch all that water. Pallets of buckets, in fact, more than 500 are deployed to catch any water still leaking.

Officials tell KOB more than 300,000-square-feet of roofing needs replacement and repairs totaling more than a million dollars.

One of the buildings damaged is the Health and Human Performance Center, housing the huge gym. Workers identified that as a high priority as the floor is worth about $1 million on its own. The gym remains closed.

Around the rest of campus, the few summer courses have been moved so instruction can continue, and officials say that these repairs will not affect fall classes when they start in August.

Insurance adjusters are due in to survey the damage and once given the go-ahead, roofing crews are standing by to make repairs.