Evanston’s Civic Center will be without heat for most of the rest of this month while a contractor rebuilds the top 15 feet of the more than 80-foot-tall chimney at the center’s boiler building.
The emergency project, scheduled to be approved by the City Council Monday, is expected to cost $75,590.
The need for the chimney repair work was discovered when the contractor, Midwest Pressure Washing & Restoration, Inc. of Griffith, Ind., was working on a smaller project to do tuckpointing on the boiler building.
In a memo to aldermen, Deputy City Manager Erika Storlie says the contractor found that some of the inner row of chimney bricks had fallen to the chimney floor and that the outer veneer course of bricks at the top of the chimney was in very poor condition.
City staff says the repairs — tearing down and rebuilding the top 15 feet of chimney — must be made immediately to avoid the possibility of a chimney collapse that could leave the Civic Center without heat during the winter and that it would not be safe to attempt temporary repairs to shore up the chimney because of the risk of a collapse.