The Ector County Courthouse reopened Tuesday after flooding caused a full-day closure on Monday.
Ector County Judge Dustin Fawcett spoke with the Odessa American on Tuesday morning and he praised the efforts from the county’s building and maintenance crews for being able to reopen.
Fawcett said all of the ceiling tiles that fell were replaced and there are fans blowing in the courtrooms to prevent mold from forming. The Ector County Judge said it’s a night and day difference from Monday to Tuesday.
”Fortunately we were notified before we opened at 8 a.m. (Monday) whenever I got the call at 6:40 a.m.,” he said. “We were able to start working on some of the clean up and taking care of everything around 7 a.m. (Building and maintenance) put in a lot of hours to get everything done.
“Our building and maintenance staff did an incredible job (Monday) to get us prepared for (Tuesday) to where we are safe for the public and safe for the county employees.”
The cause of the flood at the Ector County Courthouse came from a failure in the pop-off valve for the hot water expansion tank.
Fawcett said he spoke with Ector County Maintenance Director Billy Carrigan who said there have been steps taken to ensure this doesn’t happen again which he detailed “we have changed the pop-off valve and the pressure regulator and we rerouted the pop-off drain outside the penthouse to a roof drain. Even if we do encounter the same problem and it pops off again, it will not be able to get into the courthouse it will be going to the roof drain.”
As far as the cost of the damages to the courthouse, Fawcett said he expects an insurance adjuster to do an estimate within the next 48 hours as of Tuesday morning.
Fawcett said he hopes with Good Friday and Easter Sunday this week he hopes that doesn’t throw off an inspection.
”We have sent over a file to our insurance and we should be hearing back from them within 24 to 48 hours,” Fawcett said. “From there, we will continue down that path and see what the next steps are.”
In April of 2018, the Ector County Commissioner’s Court voted 3-2 to turn down a new courthouse proposal. Discussions and public meetings continued about a new courthouse in 2019 but those conversations fizzled out and never picked back up throughout the pandemic.
Fawcett said the county leaders need to discuss not only the courthouse but all assets that are owned by the county.
“I think the commissioners as well as myself seem inclined to really dig down into what do we need to this particular county building as well as the rest of the county buildings,” he said. “We have slowly but surely been having discussions about strategic plans for all of our county buildings whether that’s the courthouse, the library, the annex, a proposed juvenile detention facility, the coliseum, the jail.
“We really need to go through all of our county assets, not just the building but the land we own, and understand what their purposes are and what their purposes are meant to be for the future and how we make sure we set ourselves up for positively now and also into the future.”
