Karen Scott/The Northerner

Watching the progress on the roof of Landrum is an on-going event for students in Landrum’s room 103. Joe Glaser, a junior journalism major, sits at a computer beside the window during his feature writing class.

“Some people make comments like, ‘Hey, don’t crash the building!’ and it makes other people nervous, but it doesn’t bother me,” said Glaser. “I just keep going about my business.”

The class knew something was up when a truck delivered sheets of brand new plywood out on the grass in front of Landrum. A few days later, students could hear the sound of the saws ripping the plywood and screwing it all together to form a wooden ramp. What is that for? We all wondered at the expanse of wood heading right for OUR windows.

The next day in class we found out, as a huge white truck with an Imbus Roofing/Sheet Metal sign attached to it drove right up to our windows. It looked like he was coming in! The next truck, even bigger, had a five-story boom on it, and backed up to the windows.

Joe Daniel is one of the drivers for Imbus. “We’re putting on a new roof,” he said. “It’s called a Tremco Buildup, an insulation board base and a gluey roof cement, usually with gravel on afterwards to keep the weather off.”

But tearing off the old roof is where they start. “We are doing a complete tear-off and re-do,” Daniel said. So far, the roofers have torn off four dump trucks full of roofing materials. That’s where boom driver, Edie Schmitz comes in. She drives the big truck with the boom on it. The one with the large trash pan that comes up and down past our classroom window, giving everyone an uneasy feeling each time it passes by.

“The other day they hit the wall and I didn’t know if we should evacuate or what,” said journalism teacher Gayle Brown. The buckets going up and down with the old roof and new supplies is a problem for the classroom.

“It’s a little distracting when all of a sudden you see a crane swinging at the building,” said Michele Day, part-time journalism instructor, teaching in room 103. “Mostly, I’ll look up and notice it and other student’s eyes trail over to it. But so far, we’ve all escaped injury.” The only other distraction is the constant Beep, Beep, Beep coming from the vehicles, she said.

The beeping noises will only last a about a month, depending on how many people are working, said Schmitz. Imbus is finishing up putting metal on another building’s roof on campus, and they pull people off the job and rotate workers, said Daniel. “They’re all union roofers and they all know how to tear off and put on,” he said. There were five or six on the job that day on Landrum’s roof, but 15-20 workers total. The crew only tears off a section at a time because the roof is so big. “We tear off and redo a section so we don’t have too much off at one time,” said Daniel. They do it that way because of the weather.

No matter what the weather has been, spring-like or snow, those roofers have kept at it.