Wallowa High School senior Lane Tanzey was hard at it Thursday, March 17, 2022, doing some of the demolition work in the school’s Cougar Dome. It was part of the seismic retrofit being done on the structure.

WALLOWA — It looked like a bomb went off in the Wallowa High School Cougar Dome on Thursday, March 17, but it was the result of workers getting hard at it in their efforts to demolish and retrofit the structure.

Efforts to replace key portions of the structure began in earnest March 7, Superintendent Tammy Jones said Thursday, March 17.

“The seismic is about gutting the gym,” Jones said. “They’re tearing out the walls and roof.”

She pointed out “hinge points” that make the building unstable in case of a seismic event — spots where the walls don’t extend from floor to ceiling.

The fault line

Last year, the Chieftain reported that the Wallowa School District received a $2.3 million seismic retrofit grant from the Oregon Department of Education. The funds will be used to make the Cougar Dome stable and safe in the event of an earthquake. The grant will fund primarily structural improvements so that the large gym building can serve as public shelter in the event of an earthquake or other disaster.

The school and the town of Wallowa are along the western end of the Wallowa fault. That structure has uplifted the Wallowa Mountains more than 7,000 feet. It still provides low intensity quakes of Magnitude 2 (M2) to M4 every few years, mostly centered in the Upper Wallowa Valley. Based on the fault’s nearly 40-mile length, geologists have calculated that it could unleash a M6 to M7 quake. Mapping of the fault near Wallowa Lake, which shows detailed ground topography even under heavy forest cover, shows no evidence of major faulting or significant fault scarps in the past 17,000 years. But that’s only a short time in geologic cycles.

The current gym was built in 1949, Jones said, to replace an earlier one that had burned. She said she expects the seismic work done by fall. The rest of the gym project will take another year.

“The big part of that is the heating and all that,” she said.

As of March 17, taken out were the bleachers, ceiling, lockers and much more.

“There will be a new, 4,200-square-foot entry that will have a community space and where kids can hang out during lunch, new bathrooms, an elevator that will serve all three floors and as a connector,” Jones said. “The elevator will provide access to all the floors of the high school.”

Community will have access to an exercise facility when students aren’t using it, such as during evenings or weekends.

The overall project involves building new walls, a roof, locker rooms, bleachers, adding an exercise room and entryway, a larger gym floor, a laundry room and electrical work.

The seismic retrofit grant was awarded the same year the district approved a $7 million bond levy and $4 million grant through the OSCIM Oregon School Capital Improvement Matching Program.

‘Cool history’

Jones said that in the course of the demolition, interesting historical tidbits of the school’s past have been uncovered.

“There’s a lot of cool history in here,” she said.

Former professional football player Amos Marsh, who graduated from WHS in 1957, left his name and year scratched in wood that had been covered up in years past. Marsh, who died in 1992, went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions after college at Oregon State University.

A more local celebrity whose name was found not far from Marsh’s is Greg Oveson, a longtime WHS athlete and coach and the current girls basketball coach.

“I have a big tub in my office of all kinds of programs, candy wrappers and stuff that had fallen down through the bleachers over the years,” she said.