THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 5, 1994 TAG: 9411050667
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 106 lines
The city filed suit Friday against the architecture firm of a former planning commissioner, charging the firm with approving flawed designs for three recreation centers.
The result, the city claims, is rotting equipment, corroding fixtures and repairs totaling $2 million.
The suit, filed in Virginia Beach Circuit Court, accuses Krummell & Associates, P.C., of approving and submitting construction plans that contained design flaws and of negligently supervising construction of the recreation centers. The firm is headed by Charles R. Krummell, a member of the Virginia Beach Planning Commission from June 1987 to December 1990.
John W. Herzke, city engineer, said the flaws will require installing waterproof lights, hanging new ventilation ducts and cutting holes into walls of pool areas to reduce extremely high humidity levels.
``This kind of more resembles something you'd expect to see off the Titanic,'' Herzke said, pointing to the rusted remains of a heat pump motor at Great Neck Recreation Center on Friday, ``not something that's 4 years old. It's totally shot.''
There is no safety hazard to the public from the corrosion, city officials said.
This is the second time that the Great Neck, Bayside and Princess Anne recreation centers have been embroiled in controversy since they were begun in the late 1980s.
A consultant responsible for designing the pools was removed from the job in 1990 after it was learned that he wrote design specifications that called for parts sold by a company run by his son and owned by his wife. The contractor who replaced the Amityville, N.Y., consultant said the parts cost the city $100,000 more than necessary.
Milton Costello, the original consultant, and his son Ira P. Costell promised that the extra expense gave the city better pools.
Costello was a consultant to Krummell & Associates and was hired by the architecture firm.
Herzke said Friday that design flaws at the Great Neck and Bayside centers have caused hot, humid air to get trapped inside the pool areas and utility rooms, raising the temperature and corroding air ducts and light fixtures.
Similar problems were corrected before the Princess Anne center was completed this year, officials said.
Krummell, who designed all three centers, said Friday night that he did not yet know any details of the lawsuit and was told by his attorney not to discuss the case.
``We feel like it's a water management problem,'' he said, without elaborating. ``Poor pool water management by the staff.''
Earlier, Herzke said the city had studied the pool area problems for years and hired two outside engineering firms before concluding that the corrosion was caused by poorly designed air intake systems.
The problem, according to Herzke, is that the air intake and the water recirculation systems are adjacent, allowing too much humidity to enter air ducts. The pool is ringed by a covered trench that both collects overflow and serves as an air intake duct for the pool areas.
The city is in the process of separating those systems at the Bayside pool by adding a new set of air ducts. Work is expected to begin on the Great Neck pool next summer, Herzke said.
He said the pool light fixtures were placed in areas where they are exposed to moisture. This causes no safety hazard, he said, but has forced the city to replace the costly fixtures twice at Great Neck and once at Bayside.
Most of the work at Bayside, which was completed in 1992, can be done without disrupting swimmers, said Teri Dalone, aquatics coordinator for the city. The Great Neck pool, which has been open two years longer, will probably have to be closed for four to six weeks next summer or early fall to allow the work to be completed, she said.
To improve ventilation, new ducts will be run through a hole cut in the cinder block wall where a scoreboard now hangs, she said.
Meanwhile, equipment at Great Neck continues to corrode. Air ducts hanging over the pool are speckled with rust. In a utility room, floors are stained by the corrosion and equipment is rotting from the inside out.
``If I punched this, my hand would probably go through,'' Herzke said, lightly tapping a duct leading into a heat pump.
That's not the way it was supposed to be when the city shelled out $1 million per pool back in the 1980s.
Even when questions arose about the consultant who designed the facilities, city officials were assured they were getting the ``Cadillac of swimming pools.''
Costello, called before a state Commerce Department board in 1991 to explain the contracts with his family, said the parts could have been made by other suppliers and that he did not stand to gain financially from the sales. Costello did not return a phone call placed Friday to his suburban New York office.
An investigation then by the city attorney also revealed that Costello's son had included two 8-year-old filtration systems when providing supplies for the new pool facilities.
Costell, who said his father added an extra letter to his last name after a nasty divorce, defended the aged systems and his company's relationship to Costello.
At the time, Costell said the problems were merely contractual and promised that the city was getting state-of-the-art pools.
``These are not systems that we just thought up last year so we could steal money from the city of Virginia Beach,'' Costell said in July 1990. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by RICHARD L. DUNSTON, Staff
Teri Dalone, Virginia Beach aquatics coordinator, shows a rusty
trench at the Great Neck Community Center pool.
KEYWORDS: RECREATION CENTER SWIMMING POOL SUIT by CNB