Bell tower cap installed at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church
Wednesday, August 12, 2009 12:19 AM CDT
BULLHEAD CITY — Tuesday was a bellwether day for St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church.
“It’s an exciting day,” said Fr. Peter Dobrowski, pastor of the local parish of 1,365 families, as workers from Castle Steel in Phoenix painstakingly placed the cap on the bell tower of the church’s new sanctuary. “It’s a milestone on the way to the new church. It’s something to see.”
Indeed, it was. A congregation of 50 or so turned out at the church on North Oatman Road to watch work on project. While painters worked on the outside walls of the T.R. Orr Construction project, the bell tower received its 4,200-pound cap, delivered by a large crane with a 127-foot extension boom. The bell tower reaches high into the Bullhead City sky; the peak of the steel roof, which eventually will be covered with tile, is 81 feet above the ground and will be adorned by a 7-foot cross.
For many, Tuesday was a key moment in the first of three phases of construction for the new sanctuary that will provide room for about three times as many parishioners as the present facility.
“We started (Phase I construction) in January but it’s been in the planning for 17 years,” said Scott Seabury, the project manager for the St. Margaret Mary parish. “Phase I will be done in October. Phase 2 — an occupiable building — will be done whenever we get the funding. The third phase is the finished building.”
Phase I is construction of the outer shell, at a price tag of $3.5 million. The estimated $3 million Phase II is construction of the inside of the church. Phase 3 will be addition of art and statuary and other, mostly cosmetic, adornments. The project is being funded completely by the parish, which has had three capital campaigns and still is taking donations toward construction.
The bell for the new tower won’t be installed until the end of Phase I, Dobrowski said. The bell, tooled in Mexico specifically for the church, sits in the existing sanctuary that opened in 1982.
“We’re going to have a contest to name it,” Dobrowski said of the bell.
http://www.mohavedailynews.com/articles/2009/08/12/news/top_story/top1.txt