Air-conditioning should be flowing throughout Kanawha County's judicial building by Friday morning, following weeks of outages that occurred during some of the hottest days of the year.
Part of Court Street was briefly shut down Tuesday afternoon to make way for a crane lifting an air compressor to the roof of the Judicial Annex, Kanawha County Manager Jennifer Sayre said.
For almost two weeks, neither of the two air compressors has worked. The compressors sit on the roof of the judicial building and provide AC to different parts of the building.
While preparations were being made last week to repair a compressor that had slowed to working at just 50 to 60 percent capacity, the other stopped working entirely, Sayre said. It was quickly determined to be a total loss.
“New parts were being ordered and preparations were being made to fix it and then on Tuesday evening, the heat and humidity occurred and there was a 'brown out' in Charleston,” Sayre said.
The outage meant all three of the county's buildings downtown — the judicial building, old courthouse and the Kent Carper Public Safety Building — lost power.
It was that outage that caused the second compressor to blow, Sayre said.
“It completely quit working,” she said.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service was predicting Monday that last week's heat wave, which produced temperatures well above 90 degrees, would continue into this week. Monday's temperature — while the judicial building was without AC — hit 93 degrees.
The courthouse operated without interruption, despite the heat, said Beverly Selby, court administrator for Kanawha County.
“No one passed out, court has not been canceled, everything has gone on as scheduled,” she said. “We've rounded up some fans and put them in offices and courtrooms, as needed.”
Some judges and courthouse employees had reported experiencing AC problems in their courtrooms and offices a month ago.
Last month, Kanawha Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit's courtroom was without air-conditioning during a three-day trial.
The AC was back on in Tabit's courtroom until last week. Wednesday was the most uncomfortable in Tabit's chambers, her secretary said Thursday.
Sayre said she had been aware of smaller AC problems occurring in the building, which seemed to lead up to the widespread outages last week.
She was confident, though, that the problems would be fixed Friday.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.