Work on historic Saint John cathedral delayed

Restoration work on Saint John's historic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception is now months behind schedule while parish members debate how to fix water damage to its ceiling.

The cathedral's heritage foundation embarked upona $10 million restoration campaign in 2013 to help pay for upgrades to the building, which opened in 1853.

The extent of the damage to the ceiling became apparent last yearafter work on the cathedral's 24,000 square-foot roof was completed, explained Lynn Forbes Gautier, executive director of the Cathedral Heritage Foundation.

Before the roof was replaced, water had been leaking into the cathedral. Once the roof work was done, the ceiling plaster completely dried out, causing sections of it to crack and fall away onto the pews below, she explained.

As a result, the cathedral has had toput scaffolding in place to protectparishioners from having chunks of plaster fall on them.

Now, the project's construction committee is trying to decide whether itneeds to remove the entire ceiling, or just replace the areas that are damaged, ForbesGautier said.

"It's a provincially designated heritage site, so the approach to how it's fixed actually has to be carefully considered," she said.

"They're just looking at all the options, and are gathering as much information as they can to make the best decision possible for how it should be fixed."

Multi-year, multimillion dollarproject

It was expected the ceiling would require some work all along, ForbesGautier said, but "it just wasn't imagined that it would be the priority that it suddenly became."

The roof work was completed a year ago, and no other restoration work is moving forward while the construction committee studies how to fix the ceiling.

But ForbesGautier said it was always expected that the project would be a multimillion dollar, multi-year project to complete.

"Ironically, the building itself was built in just two years but this kind of work takes, with different building codes, new codes and new realities, we expect it will take a much longer time," she said.

An estimate from 2010 projected the entire project would cost about $10 million. The ceiling work isestimated to cost between $500,000 and $1 million beyond that.

In an interview with CBC last month, Anne Marie McGrath, chair of the Cathedral's parish construction committee, said the committee is busy assessing how much damage has been done.

They're hoping to make a decision in the coming weeks, but it could be longer, she said.

"It's a long way up, and it's a lot of work to remove, and new work to be done," she said.