After The Flood: YMCA Leaders Talk Remediation Process, Reopening Plans

Lucky: That’s (surprisingly) how Grand Traverse Bay YMCA President/CEO Andy Page is feeling in the wake of massive flooding at his organization’s South YMCA location off South Airport Road.

That facility took on water three weeks ago when heavy rainfall caused the nearby Boardman River to overflow. While damage is significant, Page says the YMCA dodged worst-case scenarios – and tells The Ticker the facility should be up and running by mid-June, just in time for the Y’s popular youth summer camp.

“We sustained the most damage around our racquetball courts and our squash court, which are at the backside of the building,” Page says of the South Y. “That’s the lowest part of the facility, and it probably took on a foot or two of water.”

The racquetball courts, Page notes, are “really the only wood flooring we have in the entire building” and are “not going to be repairable” – though he promises the YMCA team has every intention of installing new racquetball courts in the future.

Most of the facility, fortunately, only saw “inches” of water infiltration, and also wasn’t as vulnerable to water damage.

“If there's a building that's going to be flooded, this is a lot less complex to address than, say, an office that has a lot of different rooms and carpet and drywall,” Page explains. “There wasn’t a lot of equipment in there; it's a wide-open space; we don’t have any real drywall or any carpet that was affected; it’s mostly plastic and concrete. So, this is something that we're going to be able to rectify. We're just working through the semantics right now of figuring out timelines and making sure all the work that needs to be done, gets done.”

Still, the flooding caused enough damage “for us to have to pull up the flooring and have it restored,” Page says. He estimates flood water “moved through probably 60-70 percent of our pickleball courts and then probably half of our basketball courts.”

“We have a remediation team working as we speak to get the facility back to where it needs to be if not better,” Page continues. He projects a 2-3-week remediation process, but admits it could take longer depending on what the cleanup crew uncovers.

“We would not put anybody back in that building until we know it's 100 percent safe,” Page vows.

The big goal is to get everything sorted out by June 15, the start date for this year’s YMCA summer camp. One of the most popular summertime kids programs, the camp sold out its 250 slots in minutes when registration opened in February. In recent years, the Y has operated its camp out of two different sites – the South facility and the TCAPS Montessori School off Franke Road – but the organization had planned to consolidate operations to the South Y this summer.

Despite everything, that’s still the plan, according to YMCA Senior Program Director Thomas Graber.

“We’re confident that, given the timeframe we have, we'll be ready to go [by mid-June],” Graber says, noting his gratitude that the flooding didn’t happen later in the spring. “There's a lot that we can do from our West facility to prepare: hiring, training and development, program curriculum planning. And then, when we do get access back, it's just going to have to be a plug-and-play situation, where we show up and get the site ready to go as fast as we can.”

Still, Page and Graber have some lingering concerns – mostly about costs.

“We do not have flood insurance,” Page shares. “We picked apart our policy, and that’s just not in there for us. There may potentially be some insurance coverage from Garfield Township [which owns the building and leases it to the YMCA], but we just don't know yet. So, we don't have exact costs right now, but it's certainly not going to be cheap to fix and get stuff back up to speed.”

Asked whether the flooding could expedite the YMCA’s exit from the South Y campus – something Page previously told The Ticker could be in the cards in the not-too-distant future – Page says the opposite could happen.

“We do know at some point we're going to have to exit stage left with this facility, but that isn't anything that's imminent,” he tells The Ticker. “I think the silver lining with this remediation is that it’s probably going to allow the South facility to be better than it's ever been before, because of the extent of the work that's going to need to be done. So, we have no plans whatsoever to expedite our exit from South. It’s an important facility for this community, it's an important facility for us, and we're going to do everything we can to stay there as long as we can.”