St. Patrick Catholic Church, Galveston, Texas
RETROFIT TEAM
ROOFING CONTRACTOR: Morgan Roofing LLC
MATERIALS
The building’s aging asphalt-shingle roof was replaced with Snap-Clad aluminum roofing panels from Petersen’s PAC-CLAD lineup. According to David Morgan, owner of Morgan Roofing, installing the 9,000 square feet of .040-gauge panels was a labor-intensive process. “When you work on historic buildings, the buildings tell their own story,” he says. “You’ll uncover something and say, ‘Well, yes, this needs to go here.’”
The building’s gutter system offers one example of the complications installers faced. The box-style gutters are built into the parapet walls surrounding the roofs with downspouts connecting at varying intervals along the gutters’ full length. “To recreate the existing piece, it took 47 breaks in one piece of metal,” Morgan says.
The roof’s steep slope also required some creative thinking once panel installation began. This included designing some new equipment to improve safety and efficiency. “We had to build chicken ladders to hook over the ridge of the building,” Morgan recalls. “That way, four guys could work on the panels at once.”
ALUMINUM ROOFING PANEL MANUFACTURER: Petersen
THE RETROFIT
Members of this church are well aware of their island home’s vulnerability. They lost their first sanctuary to storms in 1871, just a year after it was built. That wooden structure was replaced with a grand Gothic masonry church in 1877. However, that building was destroyed when its massive spire—then the tallest in Texas—collapsed onto the sanctuary during the Great Hurricane of 1900. The current church was completed in 1902 to be every bit as grand (though with a shorter spire).
Just five years later, the parish heeded the city of Galveston’s call to raise the elevation of all structures as part of a broad flood-prevention effort. A crew of 100 men turned manual screw jacks to lift the church by 5 inches. This move saved the church from certain flooding during Hurricane Ike in 2008, according to Rev. John Bok, a parish priest.
An easy decision for the roofers, Morgan says, was the choice of PAC-CLAD aluminum panels for the job. Only Petersen offered a warranty the company felt it could trust, given the severe weather Galveston frequently experiences.