It is with great excitement amongst the team at Shoreline Youth Trust that we announce that the Fuse Youth Centre will be reopening to the public.
It certainly has been a long time coming, with one or two false alarms, and more than our fair share of questions from kids wanting answers about the fate of Fuse!
However, we would love to outline exactly what has been happening during that time. In the last year and a half since the youth centre was closed we have discovered that many people thought we had simply shut for good – however in that time we have been doing our best to continue providing youth services without a building, while working on getting certification which declares our building as fit for use. As a part of this process our leadership had to consider two main factors; the cliff face directly across from our building, and the state of the building itself.
In regard to the cliff face, we received confirmation from the council that they considered it to be low risk, explaining that the shipping containers were sufficient to protect us from potential rockfall. This response from the council, combined with community feedback that the cliff face was not a significant issue, helped us to conclude that acquiring an engineers report would worthwhile.
From that point we went about having the building assessed by OPUS, who contracted an engineering consultant to examine the building. Our decision to get these reports before allowing our services to operate at 25 Wakefield Ave was made with the conviction that the safety of the children attending our programmes is paramount. As such, we decided to remain closed even after receiving a positive outcome on our DEE. The building was classified 51% of the New Building Standard, which classified our building as being in the moderate risk category – however there was the potential to increase this through further investigation. We followed the engineer’s recommended advice, which was to examine the structural integrity of the walls in the hope of the raising the percentage to at least 67% and classify the building as low risk.
These investigations into the structure of our building have been carried out and have revealed that its stone block construction has sufficient internal reinforcing. As a result our DEE has been raised to 87%. On the basis of this new report and with the confidence of the engineers in the strength of our building we believe that we are now in a position to reopen Fuse to the public.
With this positive result we hope to run our first event in the building before the end of the year and will have a full range of programmes up and running again in 2013 including a special reopening event early next year.
In the meantime, if you have any comments, questions or concerns, we welcome you to contact us at Fuse either by email at info@fuse.org.nz or by phone on 03 326 7467.
Regards,
Ben Davis
Manager
