Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 02-13-25_THURSDAY_735AM

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Brad Bennington, former Builders Association official gives his take on the collapse of the NMHS gym roof, building codes, etc. Open phones follow.

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at clouserdrilling.com. The Bill Myers Show is on. News Talk 1063 KMED. Brad Bennington, formerly of the Builders Association of Southern Oregon. And Greg, uh, Brad rather. It's great to have you back on. Welcome, sir. How you been? Hey, howdy, Brad rather. It's great to have you back on. Welcome, sir. How you been? Hey, howdy, howdy. Hey. Brad, wanted to get your take, having been in construction for a long, long time,

what is your overall impression of what had happened with the North Medford High School roof collapse? I'm going to have Ron Havniar in to talk about that a little bit too, kind of going through the timeline of it and where we're headed here next. But as a construction guy, you were warning me and everybody else on the air a number of days ago, even before this all happened, that this was something to watch out for, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So do I have your permission to do a little bit of history before I answer your question? Do I have your permission to do a little bit of history before I answer your question? Do I have your permission to do that? Okay.

Okay. So Oregon did not have a statewide building code until 1973. So anything built before 1973 was either built to a local code or built to no code at all. So my understanding is that the North Bedford campus that we're talking about, I believe opened in 1965, 66, somewhere in there. Now, I'm not, I'm a Klamath Falls native. I'm not a Medford native, but that's, that's kind of what I, what I remember. Yeah. Well, I was talking with him, one of the people yesterday and saying that the gym had been constructed in 1967 is what I was told then.

Okay, okay, okay, perfect, perfect. So back in the 60s, timber was king. We had lots of good old-growth dug fir, and most of the big public buildings that we built back then were built with glue lamps. Now, what a glue lamp was is it was a piece of select lumber that was literally glued, you know, stack after stack of usually a two-inch dimensional on the height side, and then whatever it called for to meet the engineering on the width side. So, might have been a two-by-six, might have been a two-by. So it might have been a two by six, might have been a two by eight, might have been a two by 12, what have you.

But they were dovetailed together on the end, on the end lap, and then they were just stacked on each other until the depth got deep enough that it would support the load that they were supposed to support, right? So, and that's the type of construction that we have here. And then those beams would support the purlins. The purlins would support the roof deck. The roof deck would support the roofing. And then that was the vertical envelope of the building. That was how we did it back then. And it's a really successful design. It's really successful. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that kind of design, right?

We just want to be clear about that. It's just how we did it. Absolutely not. All right. But one of the things that Greg said, which is absolutely true, is that when it comes to water, it's hard for people to understand how powerful and how heavy water is. I'm just going to use round numbers. So generally speaking, we figure that water weighs about eight pounds per gallon. Now, if I asked you how many gallons of water would fit in a 12-inch

by 12-inch by 12-inch cube, most people would get it wrong. But what's the answer? How many gallons of water? Let's see. Gallons to cubic feet. Gosh, what is it about? Isn't that about a six? No, it's not six gallons per cubic foot, is it? It's crazy. It's seven and a half. Seven and a half.

Okay, I was closer than I thought. All right. Seven and a half gallons in a cubic foot of water. It's 12 by 12 by 12. Okay, got it. Right, right. So let's just say that you've got one cubic foot of water, which holds 7.5 gallons, so you've got 7.5 times 8. That's 60 pounds on one square foot of area.

Now, that is 12 by 12 by 12 okay now let's say that you had 12 by 12 by even four or five inches of ice and snow very high content you could be quite easily into what 30 or 40 pounds per square foot you know on the roof right so so when we do roof design we're looking at basically three things we're looking at dead load the dead load is the weight of the structure itself, right? So that's the beams and the plywood and everything else that's there as part of our roof, like our residential roof, right? Exactly. The dead roof. That's the dead load. Then we also have a calculation for the live load. The live load are things that might, you know, like human beings or things like move around on the roof. That's the live load. Oh, and there's one more.

There's what we call spot load. So, for instance, if you have a rooftop-mounted air conditioning unit or something like that, that's a spot load that also has to be calculated. And then the big one here where we live is it's the snow load. So after all those other loads are calculated, you have a design threshold that you have to meet. Now, back in the day, down here on the valley floor, most of the engineers used 20 pounds per foot for a design load. Okay.

Later, that got upgraded to 25. Now, I don't know. Me, personally, I have no way of knowing or researching what that roof was designed for back when it was built back in 1967. I can tell you on my side of the hill over in Clamo Falls, we used 40. 40-pound snow load was what we used back in the day. But arguably much more snow even today in the Cave Falls area. Clamo Falls is 3,000 feet higher than Medford. No. So we get a lot more, even though we have lower precipitation, we get a lot more snow than Medford does.

So as Greg was explaining earlier, when you have this nice, light, fluffy snow, which is how it started, this nice, light, fluffy snow starts falling, it builds up vertically, right? It's building up vertically. And then the moisture content begins to increase. So now what you've created with all this nice, light, fluffy snow is you've created water storage on top of the roof. So as that water, in other words, water runs off, water is liquid. You know, water is one of those amazing things that can exist in three different states. It can exist as a liquid, a solid, or a gas, right, as steam. So once that water begins being converted into a liquid form and starts getting stored into that nice, light, fluffy snow, what starts happening to the weight of that snow on the roof, Bill? Going up.

It starts increasing dramatically. And then as Greg said, when you look at these old glulams, they were a great design. They worked well, did a lot of good work. But what happens is if those glulams come under an exceptional load, a load that gets toward their design threshold, they can start separating a little bit. And it's hard to tell. It's really,'s hard to tell. It's really, really hard to tell. But if that roof was designed, let's say it was designed for 40 and they build in a safety factor. Most of the stuff that I build, I build in a safety factor of one and a half. So if it was a 40 pound load, it wouldn't fail until somewhere north of 50 pounds. That's kind of how we did it over there.

So, but if that roof structure begins to fail, it's kind of invisible. It's really hard to tell. And it never heals itself. You know, unlike your body, you know, if you crack a bone, if you, you know, tear a muscle or something, it'll repair itself. Building structural structures, of course, those are inanimate objects. And once they've accepted some damage, they can't heal themselves. And as Greg said correctly, that. Brad Bennington, by the way, with me once again. What about the homes that not only have their conventional roofs on it, but then they end up having lots of solar cells on top of that? Is that something to be kind of looking at here if you had a whole bunch of snow on that over the last few days of roof load?

What do you think? Yeah. So yes and no. It depends a lot on the pitch of the roof. So generally speaking, solar panels, it's the very nature of them that they're going to melt the snow off because that solar is going to penetrate through the snow. It's going to warm up. Those panels, they're all just black.

They're black as the ace of spades. And then that solar heat is going to melt the snow off. If it gets through it, it gets anything warming at all just black. You know, they're black as the ace of spades. And then that solar heat is going to melt the snow off. If it gets through it, it gets anything warming at all. Yeah. Correct. As long as there isn't, you know, somewhere. In other words, let's say that someone had a solar panel installation. I can't imagine they would.

But let's say that the roof angle is on a 412 and the solar panels that are a much higher rake and actually wind up helping accumulate snow on the roof. That's going to be a problem. But most of the installations you see, the solar panels are on the same slope as the roof. But there's good news for people with residential installations. If your home is newer than 1973, it is built to a statewide building code, and they've upgraded those codes over the years. Most of the roofs that people have in our area are truss roofs, and those trusses, when they're properly installed, are extremely strong. And also, their roofs have a much greater pitch.

The other thing that Greg said is back in that day, architects were really enamored of this flat roof architecture that was going on down in California. A lot of people know this, but a lot of the architectural stuff that happened here in Oregon was done by architectural firms out of California. Over in Claremont Falls, we had the Shasta Valley Mall. It caved in back in the early 70s because the guys that designed it and built it were from Southern California, and they'd never seen a snowstorm before. Oops. All right. That really happened.

So the architects are enamored of these flat roofs, and when it comes to that flat roof, the one thing that's absolutely critical is there has to be a way as that snow melts, and it does melt, as that snow melts, there has to be a way to get that off the roof or the worst possible thing happens. And here's what it is. A little bit of the heat from that building is coming up through the roof into the snow and it starts melting, but it doesn't melt enough to run off. It only melts enough to turn it into kind of a slushy kind of an ice kind of a thing. So during the day, it melts a little bit and kind of slushifies, you might say, and now the additional snow on top and the additional moisture on top continues to compact and compact and compact and become a denser and denser load and ultimately

leads to roof failure. If you can't get that stuff off of there, it leads to roof failure because even if that roof is designed for 40, loads like that can easily go north of 60 or even 70, sometimes even 80 pounds. I did a roof for a customer up at Madison Lake one time, and I can show you the picture. I can show you a picture of the cabin that I built, and Bill, it has 10 feet of snow on the roof, 10 feet of snow. But the reason that it didn't fail is because the engineer that we used for the job engineered for that, and basically it's a loading dock with a roof on top. A loading dock with a roof. I love that.

That's what it was. It's a great turn, though. So you have to keep in mind and overbuild for those sort of situations. You can make anything survive anything depending on how well you overbuild it, right? That's exactly right, Bill. You got it. Okay. Hey, Brett, I appreciate the take on it.

Thanks for sharing a few thoughts on this. And like I said, I'll hopefully get somebody to take a look at it. Because what Greg said is right. Once that damage occurs, it never heals itself. And then the next loading event could cause the roof to fail. So get it looked at. All right. Very good.

Hey, Brad, you take care. Thanks again. All right. You bet. Brad Bennington. It is 748-KMED-993-KBXG. Open phones for you now on Conspiracy Theory Thursday. We can go down any road you wish, okay?

Except maybe aluminum in the jet fuel. I don't know if I want to touch on that today. Or maybe I will. I don't know. It just depends on my mood. We'll see. There's been a crew of roofers out there for nearly three decades. America's wireless company.

You're hearing the Bill Myers Show on 106.3 KMED. Now Bill wants to hear from you. 541-770-5633. That's 770-KMED. 8 before 8, 770-5633, just like the man says. Tom is in talent. Tom, you wanted to talk about a Valentine's Day show that you were doing tomorrow. Is this like a karaoke kind of show?

Because I know I had mentioned that Tutanoff's in town doing his thing tomorrow. I think it's going to be wonderful. But what are you doing? I'm just curious. Okay. Well, it's going to be at El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant in North Ashland. That's a restaurant behind all the car dealerships in North Ashland, right off Exit 19. Yeah, I know where that is, sure.

Yeah, and it's going to be from 2 o'clock to 5 o'clock, and it's going to be kind of an open mic round-robin of various people singing love songs for Valentine's Day. It'll be kind of in the folk music venue, but it'll be, as I say, it's going to be the good, the bad, the disastrous, and the questionable. That sounds like a lot of fun, though, actually. You know, people just getting up to the mic and singing songs. If you do your best Frankie Valli, My Eyes Adored You or whatever, right? Exactly. That kind of thing?

That's what it's good. There's no charge. It'll be just, you know, it's kind of a fun thing going on. Yeah. Now, if you want to have a crass Valentine's show, that's when you do The Beatles' Why Don't We Do It in the Road. You know, that kind of thing. You bring that up instead.

Well, you can emcee that one. All right. Hey, thanks so much, Tom. Good can emcee that one. All right. Hey, thanks so much, Tom. Good to hear from you, okay? All right. All right. Now, do you have anything to add to Conspiracy Theory Thursday, though? I can't believe you.

Well, I was reading the Rogue Valley Times. Okay, well, that's a conspiracy theory. Let's hear it. Sure. About the roof collapse. And we had the Medford School District said, there is no evidence of an engineering problem. That really brings to mind that clip in, you know,

Groucho Marx is caught in bed with a woman, and his wife comes in, and he says to her, to his wife, he says, are you going to believe me or you're lying? Right. So there we got a collapsed roof, but there's no engineering problem. Well, you know, I think when they say that, though, engineering problem, engineering problem means that, you know, hey, the roof was designed to do a certain thing and it was overstressed because of that.

Well, it doesn't make any sense to have a flat roof 200 feet by 200 feet in this area. No, there was an engineering problem. Okay. All right. Appreciate the opinion. Thank you, Tom. 7705633 on Conspiracy Theory Thursday. All right.

What are we going to do here? Okay. Lucretia, I do not want to talk about aluminum and jet fuel. Okay? I've made that very clear. All right? Okay. All right.

I'll tell you the letter I sent to Eric Peters. Okay. I like to look at all the hidden information. Okay. So last night I was watching an incredible documentary, and one of the things that it came up with was in the extraordinary story of John Worrell Kelly. And also in 1921, I don't know what John Wuerl did if he did a water car. This other guy, the paper clipping actually has that it's electricity taken from air drives automobiles. Now, that seems absolutely ludicrous. But what's interesting is Foster Gamble of Thrive, always very fascinated by a tourist field. He actually flew down to Zimbabwe and interviewed and looked at the machine with another electrical engineer and scientist, Neil, whatever, can't pronounce his last name.

Okay, now make sure, please don't go on to 40 different names of people. Okay, I won't. All right. It's fascinating. They went down and they really reviewed it, made sure it was all real and that he was actually doing this but he is literally created a a tv not only you don't even have to plug in but a a helicopter that flies on the radio frequencies, and then he has a big whole device that can power like 70, I forget, 70,000 homes or something.

And it's all electricity that comes from radio frequencies in the air. Now, that's interesting. I watched one of those videos that you had mentioned to it. Yeah. I would like to see it for myself, though. And, you know, and if there is a device that is able to take radio frequency, radio power out of the universe and power devices, hey, good. Then I don't have to worry about the gangrene solar cells and all the rest of it. We'll have our little Mr. Fusion then maybe for our car because perhaps you'd need a larger antenna to be able to suck all that energy.

It still sounds a little nonsensical to me. And all I'm saying is that if he really has those kind of machines that are pulling it out there, get it out on the market. And I don't think you'll have any trouble selling it. Well, they can't get a patent. The government won't do something like that because it doesn't go with physics, which is BS, because they were doing it back in 19- Okay, well, if that's the case, just sell it. Right, right. No, I know.

The whole thing showed all these buildings that obviously, remember I was telling you that they found that every meter you go up, you get another 100 watts of electricity. So you can see these tall meters, whether it's Eiffel Tower or other buildings that were really tall, and you can see the electrodes, not the electrodes, the cathodes, all part of the buildings. It's really a fascinating fact. Yeah, but you see, that's having to do with the static electricity built up on buildings. Now, there's a difference of potential between the sky and the Earth itself.

I mean, we get that, which is all lightning is. Now, if you can find a way to tap that difference in potential all the time routinely, that could be really interesting. I mean, I don't want to just completely poo-poo the idea, but the idea that there's this guy with his television set and it's powered by just a little box on the back there supposedly sucking RF power that just happens to be all out of the air, you know, into it and powering it. I have my doubts. I'm just saying.

That helicopter would scare me. That would scare me. Yeah, getting on the helicopter and then all you had to do is that you turn off all the transmitters around there. Now, it sounds great in theory. It just sounds like a really great theory, Lucretia. But, you know, and just one thing. I never said all this aluminum is coming from the jet fuel. I'm saying they're spraying it. I'm saying this guy is saying that it's helium,

excuse me, aluminum and barium is used in bomb devices because it's very explosive. Yeah, it's also used in aluminum foil. But my aluminum foil doesn't blow up, okay? It's even half of 1% of what's being out there now. Okay. Yeah, you know, to make the claim that because there's aluminum and barium in the air, and then all of a sudden the trees just go up like matchsticks,

when it can be easily explained away with the fact that drought and nothing being done to them and Mother Nature will harvest them one way or the other. I'm going to go on that end, okay? Have you not read Gordon MacDonald? No, I'm not. No, okay. No. Hey, listen, I'm glad that you, I'm glad that you read Gordon McDonald and everybody else that claims that they're ordering the weather.

All I'm saying is get a hold of that person and order us some nice weather, okay? Can you do that? No, you don't get that. This is weather warfare. Yeah, but it's only weather warfare here. Okay. I don't get that, Lucretia. I just can't live there.

What did he say? The tornadoes? Oh, come on. Yeah, you know, I had tornadoes when I was a kid. I also had contrails above me from the airplanes when I was a kid. I guess, you know, we're still here. God love you. Big news for Dizzy.

What did he say they would use against just weather warfare? He also said they'd use the frequencies to lobotomize the brain of everybody in the region. Well, I'm being lobotomized by this phone call right now. I know, Bill, but, you know, look at who he was. I know. I'm sorry. Lucretia, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. That's all I'm going to say.

God love you. You have a great day, okay? I got to go. And we're going to talk about how the weather wars ended up destroying the North Medford High School gymnasium. Maybe that's where we're going to take this next on Conspiracy Theory Thursday. On KMED and KMED HD1 Eagle Point Medford, KBXG grants pass. And then we'll have some more phone calls.