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Community Corner

Miracle at Historic Springfield Church

On a hot July day in the summer of 2012 a member of The Blue Church on Baltimore Pike just happened to be walking through the church sanctuary in the middle of the week when he heard an unusual popping sound coming from the ceiling,

“He said it sounded like firecracker or a gun shot,” explains Blue Church Senior Pastor Bob Kinzel. 

A church leader went up the stairs into the attic and then climbed the wooden ladder up through a hole in the ceiling that leads to the massive “crawl” space under the roof of the church building. While the main stone sanctuary building was built to blend in with the other church buildings from the mid-1800s it was actually built in 1967.

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Soon after structural engineers also climbed up into the space where few parishioners ever venture to get a look at the wooden rafters that hold up the roof and hold the building together.

What they discovered was surprising to church leaders, and to the experts they called in.  “It remains unexplainable by engineers who have studied the situation.  Several trusses were compromised, about 60 percent were compromised,” Pastor Kinzel says.  “There were a few little cracks in the plaster (that could be seen in the sanctuary)  These are the kinds of things that happen naturally in almost any building as it settles over the years but no one would have expected or guessed the situation was as serious as it was.”

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Engineers who took the first look at the situation told church officials that the building was literally collapsing in slow motion.

The sanctuary was immediately closed. It remained closed from mid-summer 2012 until just before Christmas last year.  For the curious who may have peeked through a window or door into the church the scene was a mystery.  There was no obvious sign of the problem like crumbling ceilings or huge cracks.  Everything in the church sanctuary looked perfectly normal.

As church services moved into the auditorium of an attached building (the original, smaller, church sanctuary is now the oldest free-standing church building in Springfield) work began on identifying the cause of the twisted wood trusses and saving the building.

What caused the problem continues to baffle engineers. Pastor Kinzel says the huge wooden trusses were traced back to a Philadelphia area manufacturer that made wooden trusses for several other church buildings in Delaware County. According to Kinzel none of those buildings that they know of has had a similar problem.  The truss maker is no longer in business, making it even more difficult to investigate what might have caused the wood to crack and twist. 

Invisible Reconstruction

When a new roof is being put on a building it is often easy to spot from the outside.  This roof project was no ordinary project.

Engineers and the contractor rebuilt the Blue Church roof from the inside out, making the work virtually invisible to anyone who was not inside the giant space between the roof and ceiling of the sanctuary.

“They built a giant steel superstructure under eaves,” Kinzel explain.  Then they bolted all new wood trusses to the new superstructure.”  The result is a rectangular steel tunnel which is big enough  for several tall people to walk through.  The superstructure runs the length of the  building, in the center of the triangular wooden trusses.  The old trusses were not removed.  They were bolted to the new weight-bearing trusses that now hold up the roof.  

The roof was also replaced, one small section at a time.  Observant passers-by may have spotted small sections of the roof missing during daylight or a tarp on the roof when work stopped for a night or weekend.  The roof was completely replaced but it was never completely removed as you might see when a house gets a new roof.  Down below, inside the sanctuary, the only sign of construction above the ceiling was a giant scaffold erected to add support to the ceiling as construction work went on in the space above.

Praise for a Miracle

Eighteen months and more than half a million dollars later (the cost was covered by the church’s insurance) parishioners celebrated the safe re-opening of the sanctuary with a special service and lunch thanking the construction workers who had saved the building.  Pastor Kinzel says it was important to the church to thank the workers for a job well done and to thank God for their skills that went into saving the church.  Had it not been for one person being in the right place at the right time, in the middle of the week on a hot July day who heard a simple pop and reported it this story could have had a much different ending.

“This building was saved by the grace of God,” Kinzel says. “When we look at this situation there are three things stand out. 1) No one was injured as a result of the problems with the roof or during the construction. 2) The cause is unexplained. None of the engineers have been able to come up with a plausible explanation for why the original trusses failed. 3) The cost of the repairs was fully covered by insurance.”

The Blue Church welcomes the public to attend Sunday services and see the inside of the building.  For more on the church, its history and how it came to be called “The Blue Church” visit the church’s website at www.blue-church.org/

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