Three city employees have lost their jobs, two have been demoted and one has been suspended following an investigation into extensive water damage at Burton Barr Central Library. The downtown library has been closed since July when a storm caused the sprinkler system to malfunction.
The flooding was so severe that the library is not expected to reopen until June of next year. Phoenix City Manager Ed Zuercher says before the incident, city employees received inspection documents, at least twice, identifying the potential for the sprinkler system to fail — but didn’t act on the information.
“So that’s a real problem because people need to be raising these issues and communicating about them,” he said. “And had that been done, we would have been able to fix the sprinkler system before it got activated. So, it was really a failure to communicate what information was available to them.”
From this, Zuercher said, the city can improve how it does building maintenance — and has employees working on that. The said that pending City Council approval, the city is looking to open a temporary downtown library by December.
