Will this roof fall on customers this year?

What happens when the roof of a 3-story building falls on a room full of customers? The center of this building is wide open and when this picture was taken, from the customers vantage point inside the store you could see the sky. If the Ohio Renaissance Festival received proper building inspections, how could it have opened and allowed the public to enter a building which seems so clearly to be dangerous in any century?

We thought very seriously about not showing you this picture because we noted was repaired last year. We decided that it would be a very good couple of photos to share in this conversation about building code. As you can see from these pictures, the roof on this building at the Ohio Renaissance Festival looks like it is just about ready to fall on the customers entering the building. From the second photo, you can see that from the inside of the building the sky is visible. Obviously, in its pictured state this is unacceptable. If one of those large shingles lets loose from it’s estimated 40 foot perch, what would it do to a customer’s head? What would it do to your child’s head?

Making matters even worse: This building is so close to and towers so high above the buildings to either side that if the roof were to catch fire, the flaming shingles would no doubt fall on the buildings on either side. For this reason, I am not sure if it is a good thing that these shingles are not real slate. We do not know what the building material is as it is something we have never seen before. We think it is thin plywood which has been painted slate gray. If it were real slate, it would no doubt be able to decapitate a person. This seems to have made the material a choice of:

Death by capitation or death by fire?

When asked, the site manager informed me that this problem was repaired just about a year ago. Was a building permit issued? Was the repair inspected? Was a licensed / bonded repair person used to fix this problem? I haven’t bothered to check, partly because there is no reliable way of checking these things and partly because the obvious answer is a resounding No. Why? Well building code simply does not allow for this type of construction in a commercial building. Why? Well, look at the clear threat it poses to the public.

In fact, there is no roof on this building. There is only shingles. This is why where the shingles are missing you can see sky through the holes. This is why we feel the place is such a threat. If there were a roof under those shingles, chances are a falling shingle would go to the side, maybe into the crowd if the wind caught it but probably to the side. Without a roof, it seems like it would just fall straight down onto the heads, shoulders, and maybe faces of customers and children.

So has it been repaired? Is their now a roof under those shingles? We really don’t think so. From what we could tell the rafters would not support a proper roof because they are not up to standard Ohio Building Code. So while this building might now look acceptable from the outside, we think it is just a matter of time and we think the local building inspectors have let this go on for years, and years, and years….

Fact: ORF Inc. management knows about this threat. For years the building became worse and worse until it became so obvious that they ordered the owner to fix it. Cosmetic repairs were made so the underline problem would not be as noticeable. But the same problem exists. This building has no roof under those shingles and the rafters holding the whole thing up are not acceptable. ORF Inc. management knows this full.

If this building, with customers walking in and out, is so noticeably a serious threat one has to wonder what is going on in the 150 – 200 permanent structures which might not be as noticeable. Why could public safety officials let this place open with problems like this?