Please continue to keep St Paul’s, Alton (part of the Episcopal Parish of Alton, along with Trinity Chapel) in your prayers as they begin the long haul of recovering from a fire that ravaged their office building on June 23, and left the church building with smoke damage.
From Mother Cyndi Sever:
Right now we are worshiping in the garden at St. Paul’s. Although the church proper wasn’t involved in the fire, it suffered smoke damage, and toxic residue is all over everything. There are 2 types of asbestos in the air, along with other things. Air cleaners are running in various places in the building.
Every organ pipe must be removed from the building and specially cleaned. Everything salvageable with fabrichas been removed, cleaned, and stored off site. All the other surfaces must be cleaned. All the asbestos needs to be removed before anything else can happen. All the cleaning in the church proper must be done before we can reenter. So it looks like we’ll be in the garden for a while yet. Trinity is too small for social distancing right now.
One estimate says we’ll be moving back into the building with a new office wing (upstairs and downstairs) in 6-9 months. We had a prayer service in the garden 2 days after the fire, with over 40 people in attendance: parishioners and community members.
You can read about the fire at the River Bender here and here and The Telegraph, both local publications. Coverage of the prayer service after the fire is at the River Bender here.
Firefighters take a break from battling the blaze at St Paul’s, Alton
Photo by Diane Martin
