Victoria’s Parker Johnston Industries Ltd. has won the job of installing a new bright-white roof on Calgary’s Saddledome.
“It’s a nice contract in that it’s high profile,” general manager Rod Parker said Wednesday. “It shows the Calgary marketplace that we are serious and we can get jobs like this done.”
The three-generation family firm opened an office in Calgary five months ago. It won the job with a low bid of $2.5 million. The work, tendered prior to the recent flood, is being done because the roof was damaged during a severe hailstorm earlier this year.
“It’s going to mean an establishment in Calgary and a profile in Calgary that we didn’t have before,” Parker said. “Large contractors will be more apt to not only invite us to bid, but to use our numbers because we can prove we can get stuff done.”
Work starts on July 15 after the annual Stampede wraps up. The project will take 80 days.
Parker Johnston’s bid was six to seven per cent lower than the second-place bid, Parker said.
Workers will first take all the old roofing down to the existing deck. That requires removing the 180,000-square-foot Sarnafil roof, a hot-air welded PVC membrane, and replacing it.
“It’s similar to a very, very expensive vinyl deck membrane,” Parker said.
It is the same kind of roof that Parker Johnston installed on Commonwealth Place in Saanich last summer.
About 15 Calgary labourers will be hired. Another five Calgary journeymen and two Victoria journeymen will be on the job as well.
Installing a new roof on the Saddledome is not that challenging but there are safety concerns because it’s difficult to erect railings on a building without a perimeter parapet. Parker Johnston is engineering custom safety railings for the Saddledome.
The company is working for the Calgary Flames organization, which manages the building.
“The Flames have allowed us to put actual marketing banners on site, which is really neat,” said Parker.
When Parker was at the Saddledome last Thursday he was impressed by the city’s “can-do attitude.”
“They were going to get that building ready for Stampede whether it killed them or not,” Parker said. “When we got there all [the ruined chairs] had been ripped out and thrown in the garbage. They had probably 1,000 people working on the site. They had the whole building tarped off on the inside to mitigate dust. They had cleaners in there. There is amazing resiliency in Calgary.”
