Nagatani Center unusable, for now

Since 2013, the sparkling, renovated Nagatani Academic Center has been a facility the UH athletic department can point to with pride.

That pride was dampened on Tuesday, when a torrential downpour, a remnant of Hurricane Lane, caused severe water damage to the Gym II practice facility, which lies above the student-athlete academic center and some adjacent women’s locker rooms.

You might have read about it in Thursday’s print edition of the Star-Advertiser.

Athletic director David Matlin, who personally helped salvage computers from the center Tuesday morning amid the storm, was relatively upbeat about the situation a day later. (It helps that the contractor that was working on the Gym II renovations is stepping up for the repair costs of Nagatani, as well.)

If this incident sounds at all familiar, that’s because it was like a miniature version of the dramatic Halloween flash flooding of 2004 that carried mud and debris all the way through the Manoa campus, and down through the parking structure and into the UH athletics facilities. Gym II was among the casualties then, too.

Matlin did not have a specific target date for getting the academic center up and running again. He said staff has been relocated on the lower campus on a temporary basis, with academic services intact.

With the contractor’s (Layton Construction) work diverted from Gym II to help repair the Nagatani Center, you might expect a delay with the Gym II refurbishment, but per Matlin, that is still expected to be finished prior to the Diamond Head Classic, which was the previous target.