The Oakland Building, home of the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office, will get an update: repairs on nearly 200 cracked or broken panes of glass in the building’s many windows.

Before county officials contracted the work out, however, an engineer from RPA Engineering, of Greenville, was called in to do an analysis on the structural integrity of the upper floors — there was a question as to the safety of glass repair crews working in the building, according to Beaufort County Public Works Director Christina Smith.

“His findings were to do repairs to approximately 45 of the floor joists of the third floor,” Smith said.

Smith said crews are working on either replacing third floor joists altogether or sistering them, a process in which a new board is attached to an existing joist to provide additional strength. Most of the work is located in areas that burned during a building fire several decades ago. Smith said, though the exterior of the joists may be charred, the interior of them had plenty of strength, but in order to ensure the safety of construction crews repairing the windows, the additional support was needed.

A tour of the second and third floors of the building shows many structural fixes made over the years, from metal joists shoring up parts of the roof, to structural I-beams boosting sagging ceiling joists.

Smith said the glass repair is preventative. The building has a total of 39 large windows with a total of 895 panes of glass. Of those, 167 panes are cracked or broken.

“Potentially there could have been water leaking in,” Smith said. “That’s why we’re doing this work: to go in and seal the windows to prevent any future damage.”

According to Beaufort County Sheriff Alan Jordan, the building has had plenty of damage done to it over the years. During Hurricane Irene in 2011, bad drainage between the pitched roofline and the roof’s outer façade caused water to travel straight down two stories of interior brick walls, destroying walls, ceilings and carpet in the sheriff’s office on the first floor. At the time, the county’s E911 system servers were protected from the rain by telecommunicators, who layered plastic over the equipment, at the risk of physical injury, Jordan said. Though there have been no substantial leaks since, the plastic remains rolled up the walls in case of a future emergency.

For Jordan, the state of the building is just another reason that points toward the need for a new public safety facility for the county; minimum upkeep on the facility is not enough.

“How much can you really do with a building like this without a substantial outlay of cash?” Jordan asked.

County commissioners are currently working with architects to build a public safety facility that will house a new sheriff’s office, e911 call center, emergency management office and jail in the Chocowinity Industrial Park.

Smith said she did not know what county plans for the building when, or if, the sheriff’s office moves out, but for right now, the cost to the county comes in at about $9,000 to make the window repairs.

Had the county gone the historically accurate route, replacing the windows with historically correct double-paned glass and windows, the cost to the county would have totaled upwards of $400,000.