Fire damage at Family Y is repaired
By Bonnie Edwards
Published in News on February 17, 2005 2:13 PM
The men's locker room in the Goldsboro Family Y reopened Tuesday morning -- four months and a day after a fire damaged the facility.
Kriquette Davis, the Family Y's associate executive director, said the general contractor for the repairs, R.N. Rouse, had crews working on weekends and nights to get the job done as quickly as possible.
"We didn't know what we'd find when we went in there," she said. "They're still working on the ceiling in the community room, where the drink machines are."
The community room is the gathering room and is usually filled with senior citizens in the mornings for coffee can cakes and with the after-school crowd in the afternoons.
The men's fitness center, where the fire broke out in the sauna heater early one morning, was the last to reopen.
"We're real happy," said Ms. Davis. "Our members have been tremendous. A big group of them wrote thank-you notes to the construction companies."
She said the general contractor had expected the job to take as long as nine months, because there was no way of knowing the extent of the electrical damage. Ms. Davis said even the insurance company was surprised the job was finished in so short a time.
The Family Y has been in Goldsboro 20 years and currently has 8,060 members. A 20th anniversary celebration was held in September, and the staff burned the bank note on the building.
The 107,000 square-foot building houses an enclosed Olympic size pool with adult lap lanes, a six-lane, 25-yard therapy pool, an indoor running and walking track. It's fitness center is equipped with Keiser, Universal, free weights, life cycles, bicycles, treadmills, rowers, Nordic tracks, step mills, versa climbers, elliptical walkers, stair climbers and a tread wall. The Y has a triple gym, multi-purpose rooms, on-site nursery, showers and lockers, free aerobic, cycling and yoga classes to members, sauna and steam rooms and Jacuzzi. The Y also has a sports complex featuring six multi-purpose fields and a 1.5 mile track.