OTTUMWA — Workers at the Ottumwa Community Outreach Ministry’s downtown facility have spent most of this week wading through piles of fluffy, gray snow. And this stuff doesn’t melt.

The center is shut down for now. No one knows exactly how long it will be before they reopen. The sprinklers that protect the building from fire are to blame.

OCOM’s Phillip Holm said the kitchen sprinklers froze. The sprinklers’ glass fire sensors broke sometime between when the pipes froze and when they thawed. The sprinklers interpreted that as a fire, so when the water thawed, it flowed. It brought down the kitchen ceiling and created a tremendous mess.

“We came in on Monday morning and found Niagara Falls,” Holm said.

The ceiling collapse created several problems, none of which has a quick solution. The water soaked the insulation. Crews spent much of this week removing it, whether it was wet or dry. Mounds of the gray stuff cover the kitchen floor and shelves. Dried spatters are stuck randomly to the walls, fallout from the ceiling’s collapse. It all has to come out, or the center risks mold forming.

Getting to the insulation required workers to tear out the entire ceiling. What hadn’t already collapsed was pulled down. A constant drift of dust showed where people kept at it on Tuesday.

Tearing out the insulation leaves the center with little to stop the loss of heat. They need to replace the insulation, but there’s no way to do that without a ceiling in place. So Holm said the center will have to tear into the floor above the kitchen, the planned location of a men’s shelter, to blow insulation back in. That pushes work on the shelter back.

The biggest challenge is just cleaning up. Everything in the building is contaminated. Walls, floors, furniture, everything. Holm thinks it will take at least a week just to wash all the dishes and remove all the dust. Heavy plastic covers the stainless steel kitchen fixtures. It keeps new insulation from getting in but the fixtures still have to be sterilized along with everything else. The kitchen can’t reopen until that is completed.

“This has created a week’s worth of work, and it’s all just cleaning,” Holm said.

Help is coming in. Holm said people are finding out about the center’s problems through the grapevine. He hasn’t done anything to ask for help, but volunteers are coming forward.

Lorrie Bouchard and Marty Schmitt spent a good chunk of their Tuesday at the center, pulling out insulation and what little ceiling material remains. It’s not glamorous work. There’s a constant haze of dust in the air. Both wore masks to keep it out of their lungs. It’s slow, dirty work.

Bouchard came from the Ottumwa chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

“We came out to see what we could do to help,” she explained.

Schmitt has ties to the center. In fact, he has taken out an application for board membership. He said other workers took a total of 40 garbage bags full of insulation out to the landfill Tuesday morning. He was at work making sure there will be other trips.

The damage goes beyond physical. The center’s structure is sound despite the ceiling damage, but all the food stored for meals is gone.