 Hello and welcome to Enhancing Resilience of Sacred Places. I'm Jennifer Sandy, Senior Field Director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I'll be providing a brief introduction before turning it over to our three presenters. To provide a bit of background, the preservation of historic sacred places has long been a priority for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Historic houses of worship across America contribute significant value to their communities and their historic and cultural significance are essential parts of our national heritage. Sacred places function as hubs for social service programs, provide essential spaces for community gatherings and social justice activities, and host a variety of arts programming, frequently at low or no cost. Sacred places are also critical to the resiliency of our communities. Congregations are often among the first to organize and respond to tragic events in their community, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, fires or earthquakes, and often play leading roles in ongoing recovery efforts following disasters. Historic houses of worship often provide shelter to those displaced and serve as distribution centers for food, water, clothing, medical supplies, and other essentials. Today we will hear from three presenters about ways that congregations can assess and improve their resiliency to ensure they can continue to serve their communities. Before I turn it over to the first speaker, I want to share a resource that can help congregations stewarding historic houses of worship. Although many historic sacred places are considered icons of stability in their communities, today congregations of every faith face challenges in stewarding their aging and often architecturally complex facilities requiring increasingly diverse streams of funding to be sustained as centers of community life in the 21st century. For this reason, the National Fund for Sacred Places was established in 2016 to provide technical and financial support to congregations building their capacity and increasing their stability. The National Fund is a program of partners for sacred places in collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is graciously funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of religion, education, and community development. The National Fund program provides large capital grants of up to $250,000 for critical repairs to historic sacred buildings like masonry restoration, roof repairs, ADA upgrades, structural stabilization, upgrades to community meeting rooms, and more. Since its inception, the National Fund has supported 81 projects in 35 states and the District of Columbia, representing 23 different faith traditions. But the National Fund is much more than just a grant. Program participants receive training and extensive technical assistance for partners for sacred places and the National Trust in areas such as fundraising, space sharing, economic impact of services provided by community serving congregations, capital project planning, and rehabilitation treatments. For more information about the program requirements, visit fundforsacredplaces.org, and you can also email grants at savingplaces.org. And with that, I'll turn it over to our speakers. First up is Sarah Jones, the associate director for community engagement at Partners for Sacred Places. She helps congregations identify and live into the vital roles they play in their neighborhoods and in society at large. Sarah coordinates and oversees consulting projects, facilitates community engagement services, and develops programs to build congregations capacities for building stewardship and community service, including disaster response and recovery. Next will be Bill Dupont. Bill is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects. He serves at the Conservation Society of San Antonio's Endowed Professor at University of Texas at San Antonio, and directs the University Center for Cultural Sustainability, considering the heritage of people as a core element of a sustainable future. Professor Dupont's projects involve deep resilience, conservation of intangible heritage, condition assessment, feasibility, and master plans for historic sites. We will conclude with a case study highlighting one approach to resiliency at a coastal church in Alaska presented by Grant Crosby, who was actively involved in the project. As a historical architect at the National Park Service based in Anchorage, Grant manages historic architecture and cultural landscapes programs for the Alaska region. He's a registered architect in Alaska and is the current chair of the Alaska chapter of the American Institute of Architects Historic Resources Committee. Thank you and enjoy the presentations. All right, thanks, Jennifer. My name is Sarah Jones, and I'm the Associate Director of Community Engagement at Partners for Sacred Places. I was also part of a research team led by the University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Cultural Sustainability that sought to increase resilience of sacred places along the Texas Gulf Coast. Before the team lead, Bill Dupont talks about the tools that came out of that project, I want to frame this conversation by talking about how we can think about preservation work as part of a larger effort to increase disaster and climate resilience. I'll expand on Jennifer's introduction about why we should think about sacred places as civic assets and the role that these places play in disaster response and recovery. First, a little bit about my organization. Partners for Sacred Places is a nonprofit preservation organization dedicated to the active community use and sound stewardship of historic houses of worship. We were founded in 1989 in Philadelphia, but have since grown into a national presence with staff across the United States. We believe that this active community use piece and this sound stewardship piece are intimately connected. By developing community partnerships and promoting the wider impact of sacred places, congregations can access the resources needed to preserve and maintain the physical structure. Sarah Approach to Preservation grows out of a number of research studies that we've led to identify the civic value of sacred places. We began in the late 1990s with our study Sacred Places at Risk. We were trying to figure out all of the different ways sacred places are used because we knew it was for more than weekly worship services. And we found that no one had taken a systematic approach to inventory all of these non-religious activities. So we partnered with the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work to survey congregations in several major metropolitan areas. We wanted to know who was using these buildings, for what purpose, and who was benefiting. And what we found was pretty astonishing. 81% of people who use a sacred space during the week do not worship there. They are not members. They're coming to drop their kids off at daycare, to attend meetings and lectures and concerts. They come to vote. Now they come to get vaccinated and tested. So these places have an impact beyond their congregations. We followed up Sacred Places at Risk with another study in 2016 to quantify the impact that sacred places have in their communities. And we did that because we needed a way to open up the conversation about the public value of sacred places to the secular community. And we settled on economic impact because money is a language that everyone understands. And so again, we worked with the University of Pennsylvania and surveyed congregations in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Fort Worth to inventory the ways that they are using their facilities. And we utilized the same methodology and factors that are traditionally used to measure economic impact. We found that the average urban congregation contributes over $1.7 million annually in economic impact to its surrounding community. I won't get into all of the specifics and details, but broadly that comes through direct spending in the community, subsidizing the social safety net and public education system, catalyzing spending in neighborhood businesses, and the economic impact that the congregation's own programs have in people's lives. $1.7 million annually. More recently, we've worked with Duke University in North Carolina to apply the same methodology to rural Methodist congregations in that state. We know that the rural context is different than the urban context, and sacred places serve slightly different functions in those communities. We found that in rural areas, these places continue to have an outsized impact. The average congregation has an annual operating budget of less than $200,000 and an economic impact of over $700,000. And I've gone through all of this research to underline a simple truth. These places matter, and they matter to more than just the people that worship inside of them. And because these places matter, we feel the impact when we lose a sacred place. We lose more than just a historic building, we lose a community anchor. Sometimes we lose a sacred place because the congregation declines to the point where they can no longer maintain the building, and that's an entirely different conversation. But a lot of the time, we lose them to disasters. I'm based in Chicago, and here we recently lost an important sacred place to fire, Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. Antioch NBC is located in Englewood on the south side of Chicago, and that's a neighborhood that has been very neglected by the city. It has a lot of challenges related to poverty and segregation. Antioch NBC is a historic black congregation that has a long history of community service. They've been developing affordable housing on the south side since the 1960s. They provide education programs for youth and adults, and they house a substantial feeding program for those experiencing homelessness. In April of this year, on Good Friday, a roofers propane torch accidentally set off a fire that destroyed the entire building. And while Antioch NBC will rebuild and remains dedicated to the community of Englewood, that neighborhood has lost a key resource. Disasters have a way of amplifying what matters, and never is the truth that sacred places matter more apparent than during and after a natural disaster. Natural disasters are becoming more and more common across the United States, so you probably have firsthand knowledge of the crucial role houses of worship play when a tornado strikes, when a hurricane makes landfall, or when a virus shuts down the entire world. But like sacred places impact in normal times, their contributions to response and recovery efforts are not often an explicit part of our conversations about emergency preparedness and management. Texas Impact, an advocacy organization in that state, undertook a study in 2018 to identify the contributions faith communities were making to the recovery effort after Hurricane Harvey. Harvey was the swarm that sat on top of Houston and just dumped 16 inches of rain on the city. The study found that over a year after Harvey struck, faith communities had raised over $211 million for the recovery effort. And to put that into perspective, the state government spent $500 million. Faith communities also contributed labor to the recovery effort. Over 45,000 volunteers and 526,000 volunteer hours. That labor is essential. It's mucking and gutting, it's clearing debris, it's resource distribution. As I mentioned in the beginning, I was part of a research team that developed tools to increase resiliency among houses of worship along the Texas Gulf Coast. As part of that project, partners for sacred places talked to congregations and organizations working in Houston, Galveston, and Victoria about how congregations and their buildings respond to natural disasters. We learned that they serve as resource distribution centers, as emergency shelters, as information hubs for assistance, as physical stations for the Red Cross and FEMA, as sources of manual labor, and as sponsors for volunteers from across the United States to participate in the recovery effort. Sacred places also serve as informal mutual aid networks. Congregations take care of each other and make sure that their members have access to food, water, electricity, and health care in the wake of a disaster. We're seeing in rural Kentucky right now that top photo is of Oneida Community Church, that churches are some of the only places that can offer immediate relief after the catastrophic floods. This bottom picture is of a resident of New Orleans who depends on an electric wheelchair. That church behind her, Broadmoor Community Church, is installing a generator so that folks like her can recharge necessary devices during mass power outages. And so what is becoming clear is that our communities cannot recover from natural disasters without congregations and their buildings. This is an extremely important conversation because as the climate continues to change, we are going to see increasing occurrences of natural disasters and not just in the places that they've always happened. And so what part can preservation play in disaster resilience? I'd like to look at Reedy Chapel AME as an example. Reedy Chapel is on Galveston Island. It was constructed in 1886 and is the first African-American Episcopal Church in Texas. The congregation was started by enslaved folks who started worshiping in that spot in 1848. And it is one of the locations in which General Order 3 was read, which announced the end of slavery in Texas. That's what we commemorate on Juneteenth. Reedy Chapel's first permanent building was destroyed in the Galveston fire of 1885 and the new building survived at least six hurricanes on the island. The church has responded to every natural disaster in Galveston through resource distribution and mutual aid networks. Now the photos you see here are from Hurricane Ike, which hit Galveston in 2008. Reedy Chapel Sanctuary was flooded up to four feet on the interior. Sewage back flowed into the building. Windows were smashed and mold severely damaged all of the interior finishes. The building was closed for 315 days for recovery and repairs. 315 days in which not only the congregation couldn't worship inside their sanctuary, but they were limited by the loss of a key physical asset for the broader relief and recovery efforts. Reedy Chapel is located in one of the most disaster prone areas in the country. They are going to encounter more storms and they want to continue to help the community of Galveston after those storms. So how can we help Reedy Chapel and the other houses of worship across the United States prepare for the next disaster? Reedy Chapel AME was one of the case studies in our research project led by the University of Texas at San Antonio Center for Cultural Sustainability. That team was headed by Bill Dupont who will talk more about this project and the tools we developed. Take it away Bill. Thank you Sarah, that was really good. So I'm gonna talk now about the tools that we researched with a very large team and I'll try to take everyone through it carefully. There isn't time to go into a lot of detail on some of these things but we'll be able to provide a pretty good overview here. So let me just point out what I'm gonna be covering today will be three tools for enhancing resilience, a risk assessment, resilience performance indicators and then enhancement strategies. And this falls under the umbrella of but I think maybe a new term to a lot of people which is heritage resilience. And so let me just explain a little bit about that as we go forward. So our study involved as Sarah has explained the Center for Cultural Sustainability at my university in collaboration with Partners for Sacred Places and it was all funded with federal money that came from the National Park Service through the Texas Historical Commission and a competitive grant award. At the time of this recording we're just finishing up all the results. So some of the things that I'll be explaining are not as of this moment publicly available but they should be within the next four to eight weeks. So here's our team, it's a big team and you'll see Sarah's picture there as well as mine, graduate students, faculty researchers, post-baccalaureate fellows and staff took a lot of people to figure out things and understand the current state of affairs heritage resilience. So this term refers to the, well, first break it down into resilience. So we have extreme and more frequent weather events. These are things that cannot be controlled by a property owner or anyone. They're natural phenomenon occurring as a result of climate change. And so the risk is equivalent to a threat. The building is vulnerable to damage and vulnerability is the building's natural weakness to these threats minus the resilience of the building assembly. And so resilience is a factor we can choose to manage. You'll find as I'm talking about this in addition to the building assembly there's also the resilience of the organization or in this case congregations who operate the buildings and that's a factor as well. So resilience is the capacity to survive and recover meaning a higher resilience is lower vulnerability to the threats. So risk is lowered by increasing resilience. Now let's bring in the heritage element of this. This then includes the social and physical aspects of the historic buildings, future users and uses. And in this context, we need to consider the resilience of communities, which is the ability to adapt to changing conditions and prepare for withstand and rapidly recover from disruption as well as the resilience of individual buildings, which is the ability to maintain or restore functionality after damaging events. So as we look at the whole picture and we think about planning for heritage resilience, it's about assessing risks and anticipating disasters, understanding community needs, the building context and the user capacity, the adaptation to mitigate damage from threats, which are shocks and stresses. Those are how they're qualified in terms of resilience. Shocks are sudden disasters and stresses are prolonged social, environmental or economic slow motion. Disasters and then interventions need to respect concerns of practicality resilience enhancements and protection of historic character, which necessarily includes the heritage values of the people whose heritage is associated with the place. So in assessing risks, all the standard things that one might anticipate natural disasters and climate threats, failure of building components, flaws that are inherent in the building or have become problematic over time, nearby site elements that can impact the resilience of a place, which often are not in the direct control of the building owners, but perhaps can be influenced and then social, economic or political stresses, also not in direct control of the building owners or operators, but through advocacy can also be influenced. So now let's get into our tools, but first I have to give you a little background on the study. And Sarah has mentioned some of this, but let's go over it to set the table properly. Houses of worship are anchors in their communities, often among the first to help their neighbors in times of trouble. But before they can help others, they need to be sure first that they can weather the storm. So severe weather events are anticipated to be more frequent and historic structures need to enhance their resilience. So goal of our research was to help houses of worship continue what they've always done, maintain their traditions on blue sky days and be able to help their communities in times of trouble. Case studies that we worked with were in three different locations. There were nine in total in all in counties affected by Hurricane Harvey. And the case studies represents a range of historic construction types, styles, sizes, religious affiliations and access to resources or capital. We were looking for that diversity in order to be informed and the case studies were opportunities for us to learn and study. In addition, we did in the process generate assessment reports on the vulnerability of the case studies, which are directly helpful to them. But the research that you're about to hear is about how we were informed by these case studies. The deliverables for our project include a project website which we call Disaster Proof Texas Heritage and that, as I said, will be publicly available soon. And then we created a series of tools for enhancing resilience that we put into the toolkit available on the website. So that's one of our distribution systems. We also have documents available and I would imagine the Texas Historical Commission will have these things available on their website as well at some point in the future. So let's first look at risk assessments. And in our case, it was necessary to do some research. So as with any risk assessment, it begins with data gathering and discovery, looking at maps from FEMA or NOAA and understanding the risks that are in the vicinity of wherever the property is. And then also getting existing documentation in terms of drawings and photographs. So we worked with all the case studies on acquiring information about them, looking at archival records of past disaster events, capital improvements and building care. And any past professional surveys or assessments that have been done and many times, different congregations will have worked with a local architect or an engineer to assess some problem in the past. And those were all useful for our vulnerability assessments that we did. So we needed to develop a method to assess vulnerability since there wasn't one that suited our purposes directly working on the fine grain of a project. Many of the tools related to disaster are about recovery. There are assessments in a post disaster scenario where teams are trying to assess the damaged buildings and what to do. Our assessment was a pre-disaster, looking at things proactively and trying to enhance resilience ahead of the disaster. And while there are many types of conditional assessments out there, we didn't find one that was suitable to small congregations. And so we invented our own and what we did was to add a score to it so that we provided a way to quantify how we were viewing the vulnerabilities, which we found helpful. And scoring is something that we do a lot through the research center here because applying numbers to things helps people see the relative scale of importance and it also shows a path for how to make improvements because if you see a number, you know, you can change it. So we found that to be helpful as well. So in our work, we called it a summary vulnerability assessment was the title for it because it was done kind of rapidly, even though it involved a lot of research. These were based on one or two days of site visits and we were looking at a variety of factors, impacting vulnerability, natural hazards. We looked at the soil of the geotechnical conditions, which are very important to understand. We came up with a rating system for building assemblies from excellent down to poor or critical and all for the objective of making this qualitative evaluation of the most vulnerable assemblies. And there was also a structural engineering component to this where we did what's called a finite element analysis. So using the drawings of the buildings, we analyzed how they would perform under various wind loading conditions. And so the results are something that are useful as a tool. This summary vulnerability assessment is replicable by other organizations or professionals who may wish to do it. So it's now publicly available and the forms that we used and the process and methodology are going to be available to anybody who wants to go through the similar process and of assessing the condition and understanding the vulnerabilities of each individual component. And it breaks down the building into very detailed parts and does require a professional with knowledge of historic buildings in order to complete this particular tool to use this tool. So an engineer or an architect who's familiar with historic buildings, preferably one who's worked with the congregation would be able to utilize this tool. And the result is an assessment of vulnerability through a score. And so there's an example of this that will be available as well as the blank form. So people can see the method, the form we used and then also what a finished product looks like. And we did it nine times and hopefully we can make all nine available. But at least if we get one of them from the permission of the case studies we put it out there, which we have will be in good shape. So let's look at the another tool that we developed which was something we labeled resilience performance indicators, we called it RPI. And this RPI tool for resilience performance indicators looked at a variety of factors. This one is designed to be done with less qualifications so that a person who's familiar with the building but may not be a professional engineer or an architect could utilize this RPI tool to understand the engage the performance capacity of the building, the infrastructure which is the electricity and water services and sewer services that are related to the building, the context or environment around the building and the capacity of the congregation or organization that operates the building. So when we look at infrastructure it's the assessment of the building's reliance on the grid, the grid dependence for energy water, evacuation of stormwater and wastewater and the communication systems that are vitally important especially in any disaster preparation or disaster activity. We looked at historical data for this or the RPI calls for the historical data to be included and the scores as said indicates a performance capacity for the resource. So the split of components and this was not entirely arbitrary. We went through a very careful process and deliberate and involved multiple peer reviewers from a variety of professional disciplines including emergency management agencies within state and county government and tried to come up with a way to develop a scoring system dividing the infrastructure into these components. And you'll find this is a similarity as it goes through the other elements. So in environments we're looking at site characteristics, historic events, emergency services which is the response rate of the local emergency management and response teams and land use. And it's a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet where you basically answer simple yes no questions as you go down. And then for the organization and this is really important because it's some of the most accessible ways to increase resilience for a congregation. We were looking at their past planning, how much they've done in terms of planning for disaster prep and recovery and response. What they're doing in terms of risk management, their economics, what's their fiscal financial capacity, their organization climate, who's responsible for what and who has what tasks regarding this and their building management practices. So there's a wide variety of scores that are gonna show up in this kind of analysis because different organizations are gonna approach things very differently. Some will just be very focused on their primary function, which is religion and others are much more in tune to working within their community. And some are very solo and alone, isolated in terms of their structure and others are plugged in and connected to large national organizations related to their religious group. So there's a lot of variety here, but it's an area where a rapid improvement in resilience can be gained. And this is what one of the spreadsheets looks like for the congregation scoring itself. And you can see, for example, there's things in here such as the one I've highlighted in yellow, hopefully that's legible, which concerns whether or not there's engagement with the local community's emergency response team. Do you have your firefighters and first responders over for a social event once a year? So they know your facility and know your organization. And if you do, then that gives you points. So there's lots of things there that after somebody goes through this RPI tool, they could say, well, I can pick up points in this category and that category. So the intention is to motivate the user of this tool to enhance their resilience. And then finally, there's results provided and it's a living and interactive document. It can be, you can use it again and again to re-score yourself. And it's proposing recommendations to the users from the perspective of their existing vulnerabilities so they can address them on a very fine level. And it identifies the components that don't perform optimally because you answered no or yes and got zero points and establishes that baseline. So you have a way of measuring that you're improving yourself. And I think best of all, it can initiate a dialogue with building specialists to enhance the resilience of the historic property because there's some of the questions will prompt the user to make additional inquiries to a local building professional or engineer or architect to learn about what was being asked that they answered don't know or know to because they didn't know much about it. So that's where it should be helpful. So then the last thing we did was created a list of strategies for people to enhance their resilience as findings from the case studies and the whole process of research. And these enhancement strategies we broke down into a lot of categories that are directly responding to the vulnerabilities. So we were trying to determine remedies that would stabilize, protect or restore the compromised component. And things of course that would adhere to the secretary of the interior standards for the treatment of historic properties because all of our subject properties were historic buildings. And then we came up with a way of rating the urgency based on life safety and health and welfare and also the complexity and degree of remediation attainable. So that speaks to the capacity of the organization both financially as well as their staffing levels and their overall attention to building operations, whether or not they have people or volunteers able to do that. And so that was the blend that we put into that. So here are some of them from the project website and also from another document that we call the resilience roadmap which is basically a printable PDF that reorganizes a lot of the information on the website and makes it into a pamphlet or like a small report that is in general in nature and lays all of this out for a reader at a non-technical level. And the resilience enhancement strategies are listed by component, building landscape or object. And so for each of them, when you click on it or if you're reading the report, flipping through the pages it separates them out into these categories that you see on the slide for which element of the building it is or part of the landscape or if you're dealing with objects in the building and then has strategies for how to enhance resilience of that particular item. And so these cover life safety issues such as emergency exits, fire detection, alarm, suppression, structural repairs, human health issues for thermal comfort and indoor air quality. It's very important that the people are able to use the buildings comfortably in order for them to be resilient. And that's also important in a recovery episode where the building has to be functional. So heating and air conditioning can be very important. Ventilation will always be critical because that's how buildings dry out and it's an essential component to good health. And then post disaster recovery was considered in this as well as resilience against water intrusion, water being the principal agent of decay for most of building components or damage to objects. Let's see. Okay. So there it is. That was everything I wanted to explain to you and I think now we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive into one particular case study. Hello, my name is Grant Crosby. I work for the National Park Service in the Alaska Regional Office based in Anchorage, Alaska. Today I'm going to share a presentation on the installation of a high pressure mist by our suppression system in the Holy Ascension Cathedral constructed in 1896 in Unalaska, Alaska. The cathedral is one of 50 national historic landmarks in Alaska. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for joining me. The project site is located in Unalaska, Alaska. Approximately 800 miles to the Southwest of Anchorage in the Aleutian Islands. There are two options to get there. A four day ferry from Homer, Alaska or a four hour flight from Anchorage. Before I began, it's important to recognize this is not a National Park Service site. The National Park Service through enabling legislation can provide technical assistance to the owners of historic properties. This project was initiated following the successful installation of a similar system at the Holy Assumption Church in Kenai, Alaska. And through generous financial support from the Rasmussen Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Anchorage, Alaska. The project was managed by the nonprofit organization ROSIA, which stands for Russian Orthodox Sacred Sites in Alaska whose mission is to preserve the historic Russian Orthodox churches throughout Alaska. Financial support was also received from the Fund for Sacred Places, the Holy Ascension Parish, Unalaska Corporation, the City of Unalaska, and numerous private donors. The cathedral we see today is the fourth to be constructed on the site and was built in 1896. The first church was built on the site in 1808 but was later replaced in 1825 while Father John Venominoff served in Unalaska. Father Venominoff later became the first resident bishop of the Alaskan Diocese. This photo illustrates the third church built on the site in 1858, which is similar to the existing cathedral but without the side chapels. This photo is from the early 1900s and illustrates the cathedral as we see it today which has approximately 4,300 square feet of occupied space. The cathedral is listed as a National Historic Landmark for its outstanding representation of Russian heritage which permeated the Aleutian chain from the 1750s to the present. The site's significant is also associated with Bishop Venominoff who was later canonized as St. Innocent in Lightner of the Alludes in Apostle to America for his contributions to architecture, linguistics, ethnography, historical documentation, and public health. The non-profit organization Rosia established fire protection as one of their top priorities for the churches in Alaska starting with those listed as National Historic Landmarks. Initial discussions for this project started in 2013 and targeted a high pressure mist system due to the sensitive iconography in other liturgical items, many dating to the early and mid 1800s. The high pressure system discharges the water at a high velocity as a mist rather than a deluge of water. The mist cools the flames and gases, absorbs the radiant heat and lightly wets the fuel. High pressure mist systems provide several other advantages for stark structures which I'll highlight in the forthcoming slides. If you happen to find yourself in Alaska, you're certain to see two things, bald eagles and shipping containers. The neighboring city of Dutch Harbor is the primary port for the Bering Sea fishing industry. And as you can imagine, requires a considerable number of refrigerated containers to ship the fish to the world markets. And as you know, shipping containers make excellent storage sheds so they've become part of the vernacular. In February of 2014, we visited the cathedral with the fire protection engineers to discuss the feasibility of using the high pressure mist system for this building. As anticipated, the building was ideally suited for the system, but the challenge was locating the mechanical equipment to support it. The available secondary spaces such as a coat closet, attic space, crawl space, or the upper levels of the bell tower were not large enough or were too inaccessible to house the equipment. Our site visit report included a summary of 10 locations briefly describing the advantages and disadvantages of each location. Growing less confident about a solution within the building, we included a couple of obtuse options like purchasing a vacant neighboring property or using a shipping container. The question arose, if we do use a shipping container as the mechanical room, would we even notice it? Because there are so many around the town. After several weeks of discussion, the notion of using a shipping container to house the mist system gained traction and we began looking at options on where to locate it. There are more than 35 historic Russian Orthodox churches in Alaska and services typically last two or more hours. Until recently, none of these churches had indoor plumbing or space for a restroom. Outhouses remain commonly used. At the Holy Ascension however, a restroom was added to a mechanical room constructed during a 1996 rehabilitation effort. Adding on to the mechanical room, circled on the right in this photograph was considered as an option in 2014 but had too many challenges. We proposed using a similar strategy on the other side of the site. Our intent was to mirror the restroom but on the opposite side of the cathedral and placing it as far as we could to the northeast corner. Trees in the Aleutians are far and few between if they exist at all and we learned that trees in the southwest corner, southeast corner of this site were planted in the 1930s by the resident priest and were required to remain. We chose to align the southern edge of the container with the south wall of the North Chapel to limit the visual impact as illustrated by the dashed line. The site plan illustrates the final location of the container about 30 feet north of the cathedral. The architect who prepared the design for the mechanical room and later the restroom was hired to design a cladding system and solution for the container. Drawing one in this image at the lower left illustrates the plan of the container with the fire suppression equipment included. The section drawing illustrates the system's connection to the shallow, buried insulated utilidor which runs to the crawl space of the cathedral. A similar utilidor was used for the installation at the Holy Assumption Church in Kenai and was deemed a success. As a Nationalist dark landmark with a high likelihood for subsurface artifacts, we employed a local archeologist who conducted shovel tests in the area where the foundation for the container would be located. It was determined a more extensive effort was required and she excavated the two locations for the foundation and later monitored the excavation of the utilidor. Some of her findings are illustrated on the right. And here it is, the shipping container on the site of an NHL. The utilidor runs underground to the orange post by the cathedral. The exterior of the container was furred out to provide space for rigid insulation and nailers for the siding. Note the trees behind the container which are the ones we spoke of earlier and of course, note the bald eagle monitoring the progress on the tree behind. The finished build out of the container, as you can see it today. This photo illustrates the interior of the container which provided ample space to house not only the pressurized water tanks but also the fire pump and the related fire panels. When the system enters the crawl space of the cathedral, the horizontal distribution lines run concealed to their vertical risers and only one vertical riser located in the sanctuary required a compatible chase to conceal it. The other risers were in secondary spaces which enabled us to expose them. Pictured at left is a run under the stairs to the bell tower and at right is the utility area at the base of the bell tower stairs. Note the small diameter of the piping, another benefit for historic preservation projects which makes it easier to conceal piping in tight spaces. These images illustrate the drops from the attic into the nave of the cathedral. And another benefit of working with stainless steel pipe is that it can be bent like conduit reducing the number of connections which then reduces the opportunity for leaks. The installers took great pride in creating a clean system even in the attic spaces, calling themselves sprinktitions blending sprinkler and electrician together. What's more is the stainless steel pipe used for this system will last longer in the maritime environment than a standard black pipe system. The photo to the right also illustrates structural systems added in the 1996 rehabilitation effort. In the photo at right, the crew is installing the heads in the nave, arguably the most visible space in the cathedral. In each of the primary spaces, we work closely with the fire protection engineers to ensure the heads were purposely placed meaning they met the requirements to broadcast the mist but were equally spaced and consistent throughout each space in order to avoid what we called visual tension. And when feasible, we asked the crew to center them within the bead board to again ensure they did not create visual tension but also to make them look as though they were intended to be there. In the photo at the left, note the size of the head and the fact that it's painted white. These images of the nave illustrate before and after the installation of the system facing the iconostasis. Before on the left and after is on the right. You can see the heads on the right, the bright dots on the ceiling but also notice in both photos, the soot staining the ceiling from burning candles in incense. Another advantage of this system is the heads can be powder coated to match existing colors or at least close to it. The manufacturer can match colors using the RAL color system. In our case, we chose a white that was as close to the last known white paint used. A paint analysis will refine those results prior to repainting but the heads will certainly blend in more than they would have if they were black or had a metal finish. In the end, the addition of a mechanical building to the site is noticeable but it provides the housing for a system that will protect this cathedral for many more generations into the future. To the right of the photo are some of what we determined were the benefits of a miss system for this application as well as some of the challenges. Thank you for your time and if you have any questions or would like to learn more about this project please email me at the address below the image. Thank you.