South Texas High School Details

Location: South Texas

TGCE was commissioned to perform a technical review of MEP systems at a High School in South Texas occupied by nearly 2,400 students and 150 faculty and staff. The review included available construction documents and other project correspondence provided to TGCE, current performance and indoor air quality reports, and on-site observations. The knowledge gained in TGCE’s role in a separate, but related design for indoor air quality (IAQ) remediation has also contributed to our findings.

Our review emphasized the HVAC and electrical systems, but also included plumbing systems to the extent judged appropriate. Acknowledging the fact that such a review process inevitably contains some subjectivity, a very intentional focus was to maintain as much technical objectivity as possible.

In general, it was our findings that portrayed the design documents to be significantly incomplete, and to contain a significant number of code violations and departures from accepted engineering practice. In turn, it was observed that the constructed conditions similarly contained a significant number of code violations and departures from acceptable construction practice for institutional facilities. Some of these constructed conditions were common to deficiencies in the design documents, while others were the sole result of the construction practices.