NATCHEZ — Adams County will have to extend the contract for work on the FEMA 361 storm shelter near Natchez High School.

Adams County Emergency Management Director Robert Bradford said the contract would have to be extended because of weather delays.

“The contractors were due to be done in early spring, but now it looks like they will have to move it to late July,” he said. “The weather has been a thorn in our side, but you can’t control the weather.”

The contract will have to be extended because the work has to be under contract for the county to receive reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the shelter, which is mean to withstand the storm force of an EF5 tornado or hurricane equivalent.

The shelter will only be meant for short-term evacuations, and will not be used to house evacuees long-term following a storm.

Bradford said any extension of the contract would not cost the county extra.

The walls for the building have been constructed, Bradford said, but crews still have to pour the concrete floors and roof. Concrete cannot be poured when temperatures fall below a certain point.

“Once they get (the floor and roof) done, they are going to start on the parking lot, and once the parking lot is paved, they can bring in trucks and the work can continue regardless,” he said. “When the concrete is poured, all they have to do is run a little conduit on the inside.”

The original proposal for the shelter was put forward under former Adams County Emergency Management Director George Souderes in 2008, when the federal government released money to build storm shelters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency originally funded the shelter at $3.25 million. Local delays because of funding concerns pushed the start of the project to the end of when federal funding would be available. When bids were accepted in late 2013, a price of $3,419,641 had to be set.

The increase in cost was blamed in part on inflation to the cost of construction materials in the intervening years from the initial proposal.

Despite the overrun, FEMA decided to match the costs in January 2014, keeping the county’s contribution to a 5-percent match, $171,000.

The match was met with in-kind services, with the county’s road department supplying manpower for some parts of the project and providing some raw materials such as dirt.

Before the final price for the project was set, the emergency management office worked with the project’s architects and potential contractors to value engineer the costs down approximately $340,000.