Edinburg City Council Chambers Shut Down for Repairs
EDINBURG – The Edinburg city council chambers shut down after a building inspector deemed the room unsafe.
Inspections are done at city hall and other city building to ensure people are staying safe.
Edinburg city manager Richard Hinojosa said the finding prompted the city to inspect other recently built city buildings for faulty items.
“They’re pretty heavy, you know, and if you look into the building, if you can see it on the side here it’s pretty high,” he said. “So, we just want to make sure that, you know, everything is secured and that’s what they’re going to assure us with.”
Hinojosa said buildings are inspected when first constructed by code enforcement, city building inspectors and the fire department. He said additional follow-up inspections are conducted by the fire department.
CHANNEL 5 NEWS wanted to know how often the city building are inspected. Edinburg Fire Chief Shawn Snider said fire inspectors visit schools, hospitals, libraries, apartment complexes and even city hall annually or every other year.
“Inspecting those you can find little bit of problems or a whole lot of just minimal problems throughout the system,” he said.
Snider said fire investigators address a variety of issues.
“The fire components that are installed into facilities such as exit doors, exit lights, fire extinguishers, fire alarms, fire sprinkles, clean agent systems, anything that’s designed to protect the building that those are, in fact, working or prepared to work, and are inspected according to our fire code,” he said.
He said more problems can arise as a building ages.
“It’s imperative to the building owner, to the community walking into the building that the building owner maintains those fire-protections and life-safety features,” he said.
Edinburg city hall is inspected on average every other year around April. The last inspection in 2015 stated city hall needed to address the following:
- Fire alarm re inspected
- Fire sprinkler system repaired
- Extinguisher and elevator room re inspected
- Need to re secure some ceiling tiles
- Remove storage items from stairwell
Buildings that aren’t meeting standards during inspections have an average of 31 days to address those items.
Snider said the building is due for an inspection later this month or the next.
Meetings typically held at the chambers will be held at another location until further notice for safety reasons.