Oklahoma City schools to get roof repairs

“The adjusters are in the process of assessing the damage,” said Jim Burkey, chief operations officer for the district.

In some cases, insurance adjusters were doing final inspections on repaired roofs when the new storm hit, Burkey said.

The good news is that each of the storms only struck parts of the district, he said.

“You can have a vicious hailstorm but the sheer geographic size of our district, we had buildings in the south part of the district that were not even touched,” he said. “Most of the damage was in the north and northwest and some to the center of our district.”

Diagnosis of all the problems is time consuming, Burkey said. District buildings have commercial roofing layered with gravel. Sometimes insurance adjusters have to take core samples to see if lower layers were damaged.

‘Extensive, long process'

“It's quite extensive and quite long,” he said. “You don't have to do that at your house. They don't have to bore into shingles.”

In addition to the roofs themselves, several rooftop heating and cooling units were damaged, Burkey said.

With projects as large as school buildings, the deductibles are quite large. The Oklahoma City School Board recently approved a $1.3 million fix for John Marshall High School.

“It works exactly the same as your homeowners insurance,” he said, “just on a massive, massive scale.”