Howard University disaster

Hard to believe that there were not signs of problems before this happened.

Sounds to me like water covering a steam line in a manhole created water hammer......with high pressure steam that is like a bomb going off.

And they lost two boilers. Did they even bother to check the low-water cutoffs?

You can't fix stupid!

Whats sad is the tremendous/ridiculous amount of money these colleges and universities make.

Cheer up, folks -- it's not just steam. The water supply company my daughter works for is looking for a 10 million gallon per day leak in an aqueduct. Been looking for a week, and haven't found it yet...

But there are only two people assigned to look. Go figure. And they've been told they can't pull overtime.

What about all the ancient gas lines leaking more gas than is practically being used.

Stephen Minnich said:

How large would a heating company need to be to handle the enormity of a job like that? How many techs and how many crews for an entire semester? And the fact that it's steam and of that scale makes it even more difficult to find the right company, right?

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An excavating company with several crews, trench boxes and excavator mounted pad tampers if the excavation cannot be opened for a full width to prevent cave ins in the trench, new gravel, for pipeline bedding, silt prevention fabric buried on top of the new pipe and gravel, a pipeline inspecting robot with weld inspecting capability, 1,000 PSI steam rated pipe welders, steam pipe wrapped with either a corrosion barrier wrap of heavy black poly ethylene sheeting or the painted on green anti corrosion system that is applied at the pipe mill and at the weld joints when they are cooled prior to pipe burial as used in gas and other pipeline systems.

If the excavation is on a slope or above a slope near a ditch or water course they have to install silt capture curtains with a silt fabric burying plow and then stake it up and add straw bales to support the wall of silt capture fabric until the excavation is complete and the seeded.

There is a lot of work for pipelines of any type these days to conform to regulations but id Mr. Zinke has his way most of the good done in the last 25 years will be a thing of the past.


When Cornell University began the Lake Source Cooling system they were able to employ a large diameter low pressure welded pipe loop gravity system that used the water in Fall creek to fill the pipeline loop after they installed new utilities along the entire route.

They did the pipe fabrication and preparation work for the pipeline elbows by the Purity Ice Cream Store in temporary sheds and finished the welding in the trench that was excavated for the new pipe.

New electric utilities as well as new sanitary sewer pipe and manholes, storm water catch basins and storm water drain pipe and new natural gas and water lines and telephone cables were installed along the route.

They also tied the new cooling system into the high school at the same time (I hated that place) as the route passed directly by the Dewitt Junior high school first and continued on to the high school and up hill on Lake Street to Cornell University installing new utilities along the entire route from what I remember as it accomplished a lot of work in less than three years that would have taken decades if done separately.

The big worry is that the water quality in Cayuga Lake is deteriorating in the southern basin as the cooler lake water is pumped through the heat exchanger building and returned to the lake and the existing phospate levels in the water column have increased.

Maintenance does matter but I can tell you, finding maintenance people who really know what theyre doing in a boiler room is hard, reeeaaallly hard. In record low temps, youre dern lucky to find a service provider who is competent on your steam system to back up your maintenance people.

They probably fired the people there who would have averted this disaster. Institutional memory is being lost every day in the name of so-called efficiency. Moreover, the brainiacs in charge of things these days are confident in the viewpoint that they have nothing to learn from anyone older than they, because– smartphones or something. Generally speaking, the best and brightest want to be tech wizards or write code– or something. In the process they abandon all the old technologies that also happen to sustain life.

@Steamhead says "you can't fix stupid" and he's right of course. But what we are seeing isn't just starting at ground level stupid. It's coming from the top as well, like a nationwide enstupidification created by a noxious nexus of the Harvard Business School and Silicon Valley techno-narcissism. They would have us march efficiently into the singularity. Future archeologists will find evidence of a humanity and microprocessor seamlessly integrated– and found them to have frozen and starved to death alone in the dark!

Sorry, but my dystopian plot twists tend to come from recent experience. As Yogi Berra once said, "You can observe a lot just by watching." Too few are looking up and watching.

If the conditions in my local area are any indication, there's a tiny (and shrinking) handful of older staff who know the reality of how these district steam systems operate. There is no apprenticeship, no means of passing down the knowledge.

Actually, it's worse than that. There are virtually no new hires. Outside vendors who respond only to isolated breakdowns are contracted. But no one knows the system. They just know to replace broken parts after the fact. There is no context. The big picture is lost.

Freezing temperatures and floodwaters during a winter break? Heavens! That's never happened before! Well, maybe not in the last 8 or 9 months– which apparently constitutes "the long term" these days.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a nationwide problem. I'm convinced it's a policy now.

Case 1: My local urban school district had ONE guy on hand who fully understood the steam heating in the schools that remain not-torn-down. That was 15 years ago. I presume he's been retired. A local company is contracted to replace a boiler tube or some other major failure. But the conditions are typically deplorable in the remaining older buildings, if the viewpoint of one of the local boiler inspectors is any indication.

Case 2: A nearby area college privatized all maintenance. The now-fired staff was replaced by a contracting firm who has one individual responsible for all campus steam heating systems. The systems are completely off calibration and out of control.

Case 3: A well known liberal arts college with district steam decommissioned it's lovingly maintained coal plant, controls, and master vacuum return– and the staff dispensed with. The steam generation is now handled by Ohio Special gas boilers. You may wonder how it is that the whole of the district heating system is now being maintained. It isn't. It's now the same scenario as above.

Incidentally, the immense old boiler building has been repurposed into office space for a burgeoning middle level administrator class that apparently now outnumbers the student body.

So there it is. When the physical world collapses for want of anyone who connects to life supporting technologies, there won't be an app for that! In the meantime I'm afraid we are going to see more events like this.

It's sad but most institutions of higher learning put a lot more effort into the accounting end of things than they do the education end of things. The folks that run these places are only interested in what appellations come after your name, to them experience is worthless. This is true of all to many companies these days.

Years ago I worked for a small manufacturing company, there were 100 people who worked there and many had worked there for decades. These people raised kids, sent them to school and above all hoped the kids would have a better life than they had.

Time went on and contracts were getting harder to land, the corporation that owned the company decided to cash out so they found a buyer. This buyer put on the airs of being a high roller, truth is he was always a half step ahead of the debt collectors.

They did their due diligence and signed the papers that put the lives of the people who worked there in their hands. They pushed managers who had been there for a long time aside and brought in a new team with credentials out the wazoo, problem is they didn't have a clue how to run a job shop. We ran many different jobs through at the same time, some were repeat jobs but many were new jobs. All the MBA's were clueless when it came to getting working product out the door in that kind of environment.

i was lucky because i had skills they couldn't do without, I warned them they were setting themselves up for a fall but they assured me they knew just what they were doing - just like that bunch in Washingtoon

About 18 months later they went bankrupt and shuttered the place for good, I was the last employee out the door. Everybody scattered to the winds and several of them lost homes because the company had cancelled the health insurance without telling anyone and folks got stuck with huge bills. The government had given them a million dollars in loans to create new jobs and they absconded to Pennsylvania with the funds to try the same scam again.

All because they knew better . . .

Bob

Talk about over-complicating things....
One of our clients vendors scheduled a "meeting" with me last week. This afternoon a html link was emailed to me, I had to open it up, provide credentials and log into a Google calendar which then asked if I'm participating and any +1's on my end. Once I filled in that info, I was shown the current meeting participants (just me and the vendor rep) and a phone number to call. I called the phone number, the vendor's rep answered via speaker phone and we spoke for about 20min... just the two of us... that was it. All that email and web nonsense for simple phone call between just two people that could have been handled with a simple "how about I call you at 2pm next Monday?".
It's actually sad how ridiculously over complicated once simple things have become... and that's SOP for these people I believe because now they've scheduled another "meeting" for next week via "Go To" so we can see their software in use.

Traditionally, The USN always churned
Top notch steamfitters, plumbers, electricians, welders, et al. My first job out of HS was as an electrician's helper. I worked under a close family friend right out the Navy. Squared away, knew his S--! A few years later as a union plumber's apprentice, I worked under a super-talented
Foreman who served in the USN during Korea
John was a real hard-**** until you earned his respect and it was not easy. If his coffee wasn't just the way he liked it, he smashed it on the floor at your feet! I made sure I got it right after
That! This man could do anything and was especially adept at rigging and really big pipe
He worked in The storied Brookln Navy Yard after the war. These men broke me in and I
Hold that dear to my heart. I've emulated
Their quality control and tenacity my whole career. Mad Dog

I know I have posted this before, but here goes again. My father was a maintenance supervisor in a 976 MW fossil fuel burning power plant. When he worked there maintenance was a big deal. When deregulation hit that all changed. They started cutting back, watching the bottom line closer, and started asking questions like "how long can it run before there is a problem?"

He is still in contact with the group down there and visits on occasion. He is being told maintenance is being cut back constantly, they really don't want to shut down unless there is a major problem that shuts the units down. It's sad and scary. If this (due to deregulation) is happening nation wide, I am just waiting for those news reports. There will be casualties and it will be ugly. When everyone starts scratching their heads wondering what happened, we will become painfully aware of the intelligence of the people in control. Spoiler alert, they aren't very smart.

The bottom line is taking this world over and it's going to end poorly. By the time people realize the error of their ways it's too late to fix it.

I'd bet there are other colleges watching that news reports saying "well that won't be us". Sure it won't.

Slam dunk. It is NOT a good thing. "We sleep safely in our beds at night because rough men
Stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." It's one of my favorite quotes and has been attributed to Orwell,,Churchill, and Edmund Burke. The point being: It is fine with those of us who ARE willing to take care of business in the dead of night whether in the military or police, that the average American would not be comfortable doing it themselves. However, don't try to water down, dumb down the training that will ASSURE our ability to stay alive and protect the public at large. Mad Dog

Let someone not from the USA comment on what we see in Canada that is not right with the USA of today. You have some of the best and most intelligent in the world, no arguement there. I watch CNN and what comes up, some goof that hates everyone, be it kids that came from another country with their parents or anyone who is different. My heavens ,the govenment in your country is so busy back stabbing that they cannot agree to keep your government going. The teachers in the USA are some of the most poorly paid in the Western world. When Dan and Erin say hug your kids they mean love your kids -- make sure they get the best education they can recieve. The trades back in my formative years forty some years ago used to be frowned upon, we were the kids who just did not do well in school. Now, without at least a reasonable understanding of science you cannot repair anything. The explosion that happened at the University was because of one thing and only one thing -- the maintance worker is not motivated by the customer work ethic. In the trade, if you do a lousy job, your boss chews your posterior because there are any number of other contractors who want and need the work. What consequence does the maintance worker face for not doing there job -- nothing. I was the HVAC supervisor of a large hospital in Winnipeg, before I left in disgust. No one cared about the systems because no one was held accountable, it was akin to having tenure in a University setting no matter what you did not do, there was nothing they could do to you. As for the comment about rough men -- this offends me Maddog because it makes the militay and police seem less than human. I have PTSD and I can assure you it is not because I was not a hard ****; it was because I was told to bottle my emotions up because men do not show emotion. When in this stupid day and age, are men going to let go of this stupid self harming **** idea, that we are allowed to have only half the emotions of women? A final word and then I will put my verbal runs to bed. Your president says Make America Great Again my question is when did the man and women that works hard for their kids and cares about their nieghbor become for the lack of a better term " not great". This idea is not going to get your youngsters ahead in this competitive take no prisioners world -- why should a kid that wants to be a doctor come out of school with a 500,000 dollar debt? Yeah make us all great again. All the best Jack Canada

Hey Jack. I will have to re-read because it's a long post. But quickly. I HAVE served my state & country and even did some MP work there. no one is more pro,military or police than I am. Mad Dog

Dont be mad with me MD. I have hired over a dozen veterans!

If you cant see my point or understand my position, that, my friend, is on you!