Cleanup of mercury contamination in the Temple High School gymnasium should be completed this week, after which replacement of the floor can begin.

If all goes according to schedule, students should be able to use the building again about a week after returning from Christmas break, said David Goldberg, executive director of facilities for Carroll County Schools.

“The new wood floor is coming on Monday,” Goldberg said. “We’ve had good news, like the uniforms came back, tested zero, no traces of mercury at all. So we can reuse those and also the basketballs. They cleaned, and they retested those, and they came back at zero.”

It’s a huge relief for the school system, which has been dealing with the problem after mercury was discovered in the gym Oct. 17.

The gym was closed for repairs after the floor started buckling following the Sept. 20-21 flooding. When the floor was removed, the workers found tile underneath they suspected contained asbestos. They sent off the tile and the original rubber floor underneath the tile for testing. When the tests came back, they revealed mercury in the rubber subfloor. The mercury was used as a bonding agent when the floor was installed in the 1960s.

That mercury, a highly toxic pollutant, was released into the air when the rubber flooring was removed. It vaporized into the air and then settled on surfaces in the gymnasium. It settled on the walls and floor and was pretty much contained around the gym floor, said Mike Beers, coordinator of maintenance for the school system.

“We did testing from the ceiling down about every four feet and it looked like from 12 feet down was where most everything was,” he said.

It was a problem completely new to the system administrators, and they were unsure what to do next. The contractor on site to do flood repairs was pulled off the project, while the system called in other contractors to bid on the mercury removal. Norcross-based Tristar Environmental Inc. was the low bidder. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Georgia School Boards Association, which insures the school system’s facilities, began working with the system to cleanup the contamination.

Administrators didn’t make an announcement about the contamination until the Board of Education work session on Nov. 16 and were criticized by board members and parents. Board members Dorothy Burton-Callaway and Bernice Brooks both complained that they had not been notified about the problem and, at the Board of Education meeting that following Thursday, several parents expressed their disappointment at not being notified about the pollution even though their children attended the school. Superintendent John Zauner and Goldberg found themselves both reassuring parents and defending the decision to wait to announce the problem.

Facilities Management Services, the company that has been doing asbestos abatement for the school system since last spring, is working on the removal and cleanup. Co-owner Jack Gresham and his crew have been working nearly every day, even during the holidays, to get the students back into the gym as soon as possible.

“We in the maintenance area, you know, sometimes we have to work around the schedule of the school systems,” Gresham said. “Our job is to provide a facility for them to produce those smart kids and so we had to work around their schedule.”

He expects to finish the cleanup early in the week and do the testing to clear the building for use by the end of the week. The crew was doing their own testing Tuesday and the building was clean. The EPA will be doing its testing on Thursday for final clearance.

“It’s a very good feeling to follow them around today and watch them all do the readings and watch the zeroes on the meter,” Beers said.

For the cleanup, the repairs and the renovations of the gym, the system will be paying around $352,500, Beers said. That includes $10,500 for overtime. It will all covered by insurance.