Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Limonta: "Let's start from the roofs for the safety of boys and girls"

Milan, June 8 2020 – “In Milan let's start again from the roofs”: this is the name given to the overall roof maintenance project for Milanese schools which the Council gave the green light by approving two technical feasibility resolutions worth a total of 14 million euros. A figure that would allow interventions on more than 50 roofs.

“We have made an estimate of the interventions necessary for the next school year – declares Paolo Limonta, councilor for school buildings – and we have verified that the most frequently encountered problems are the phenomena of water infiltration which cause a lot of inconvenience to the boys and girls who attend our schools and their parents and teachers."

The problems of waterproofing the roofs and the clogging of the drainpipes consequently result in small floods, damp spots, detachment of plaster and mold in the classrooms. It is not always possible to act promptly to resolve these problems, because they require long working and planning times and dedicated resources. To minimize the inconveniences, so far we have proceeded with buffer interventions on the damage of the infiltrations, which however have often recurred with the subsequent heavy rains. In the most critical situations, the children were moved to flywheel classrooms, with the consequent reduction of the school spaces available.

“Precisely the scale on the one hand and the necessary planning of the various interventions on the other – continues Limonta – has made it difficult to act in a decisive manner so far. This is why we thought of two projects that would act in a coordinated manner to fundamentally resolve these problems and dedicated funding."

With the approval of two technical and economic feasibility resolutions, one for work on the roof coverings and one for the maintenance of the rainwater drainage systems, for an amount of 7 million euros each, the green light is given to a path that will lead to the effective start of these important interventions. These two resolutions allow, on the one hand, work on gutters, downspouts and drainpipes and, on the other, the creation of suitable accesses to the roofs for carrying out maintenance work on the sheaths, restoring overall the perfect functionality of the rainwater drainage systems where it is compromised.

These are not structural interventions, but expensive works that require good planning because they require the presence of scaffolding to allow interventions to be carried out safely.

“We felt it was necessary to intervene effectively at the source of the problem. This strategic plan - concludes the councilor - allows us to provide a concrete response to the requests of parents and teachers, to make the planning of ordinary maintenance more efficient and to avoid requests for emergency intervention. At the same time it would allow us to better invest resources and reopen classrooms that are currently unusable, helping schools with greater distancing. The approval of the School Decree with the inclusion of commissioner powers for mayors on the subject of school buildings, although the procedure is not yet defined, should allow us to speed up the execution times of the interventions and to imagine being able to start with the first construction site already next October, with shorter deadlines than those we are currently used to. The Milanese schools and the children, boys and girls who attend them are in great need of it”.