RRMR school board looks at storm damage, cost could be as high as $300,000

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

The Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock Community School District Board of Education discussed how to proceed with the cleanup and repair of the school’s heavily damaged baseball and softball fields on Monday.

“We’ve been working with contractors and insurance adjustors,” said Superintendent Keith Turner. “We have a lot of decisions to make about how to proceed.”

The school board members took a look at the damaged grounds during their regular meeting Monday morning. Turner said that he expects the damage to be in the $250,000 to $300,000 range.

“It’ll be at least that, I’m guessing,” he said.

He added that there was general discussion at the meeting about how to move forward, and the possibility of taking the opportunity to upgrade the facilities, but the board isn’t ready to take action on that yet. He said a likely future step will be to create a committee to look into those various issues.

A severe weather system that came through northern Iowa on Saturday, June 9, uprooted trees, caused property damage, power outages, and flooding throughout Floyd County, hitting Rockford especially hard.

The National Weather Service said it could not confirm if the damage had been done by a tornado, or just unusually high winds, which took down over 300 trees in Rockford alone. The school district sustained major damage to the ball diamonds, concession stand and other sheds, although there was no structural damage to the school itself.

The athletic complex lost some lighting, the backstops on both the baseball and softball diamonds, bleacher seating and about 30 trees that had to be cleaned up and removed in the storm’s wake. The lighting was installed just last season. A dugout and the batting cages were also destroyed. The dugout was new this season and the batting cages had been installed just two weeks prior to the storm.

A big metal building that served as both a concession stand and storage building was also destroyed when one of the football field light poles crashed down right into the middle of it. Among other things, that building housed equipment for the irrigation system used for all the playing fields. Turner said the district wasn’t yet sure how much damage was done to that equipment.

He mentioned that volunteers in the community have put a lot of time and effort into helping to clean up the mess.

“We had over 120 people come in last Thursday and help us clean up the grounds, on what was a cold and rainy day,” he said. “We really appreciate that help.”

As for the remainder of this athletic season, obviously the RRMR Warriors won’t be using their own facilities for home games. Turner said NIACC and Mason City have been gracious enough to allow the Warrior teams to use their fields for the remainder of their scheduled home games.

“That’s our plan,” Turner said. “Our teams are going to be on the road for the rest of the season.”