Broken Boiler Cuts Off Heat on Campus

On February 5, the hot water boiler system on campus stopped working, leaving students, faculty and staff with dorm rooms, offices and classrooms in several buildings without heat.

“At present, buildings relying on steam heat — Lansdell, Science, Shott, Harman, Dome, Rish and Cruise — have no means of receiving or maintaining heat,” said BU President Dr. David Olive in an email to the campus community on February 5. “Efforts are being made to repair the boiler.”

Dr. Olive said the issue with the boiler developed from unforeseen mechanical errors with the circulation machine.

“The primary issue with the main boiler is with the recirculation system,” he said. “This failure has impacted a large amount of our heating operations within a number of buildings. The circulation pump that circulates condensate water into the boiler keeps shutting off due to the pump motor having failed. This in turn causes the water to drop in the boiler, which then shuts the boiler down due to a low water alarm.”

Students were instructed to spend time with friends in buildings that were not affected by the boiler problem, particularly since extremely low temperatures were forecast at that time.

“Residential students in Rish and Cruise may need to seek alternative places to hang out and/or sleep,” Dr. Olive said. “If you have friends in Alumni, East River, and/or Bluestone Commons, you may want to visit and hang out with them. Those facilities have electric heat.”

The president added that while the heating of classrooms was important, the residents were the top priority with the heating issues.

“All of the other residence halls have electric heat,” Dr. Olive said. “Rish has a small gas-fed boiler that is still providing heat to residents; it just isn’t as much heat as normally delivered to that facility. For residents in Cruise, residence life staff began this weekend to reassign each resident to a temporary room in another residence hall.”

Residential student Daniel Mullins said he was not having much of a problem dealing with the broken boiler.

“Before moving into Cruise Hall, I was told the building stayed rather hot,” Mullins said. “It wasn’t long before I realized that was true and found myself being jealous of the residents with electric heat. When the boiler still worked, the temperature would have to be below freezing before I considered shutting or lowering my window and turning off my fan. I’m surprisingly more comfortable now that the boiler is down. When I am cold, I can put on another blanket or warmer clothes, but I was never able to fully remedy being too hot while the boiler was working.”

Harman Chapel is among the non-residential buildings affected by the heating issue, so BU’s Music and Theater departments have been managing the cold for rehearsals and class.

“The heat issues in the Chapel auditorium have been around for a while,” said Rebecca McCoy-Reese, co-chair of the Theater Department. “It typically is addressed when maintenance is made aware of it, but there have been times we haven’t reported it and just learned to live with it.”

BU’s maintenance team began working diligently to resolve the boiler issue. Chip Lambert, vice president for operations and technology, said they found and installed a new circulation pump and are actually in the process of doing other major renovations to the boiler to prevent issues like this from happening again. According to Christian Hershey, director of campus facilities, the maintenance staff has dealt with transition this year and improving processes within maintenance.

“I am dedicated to promoting a much different culture in the way in which we approach our facilities infrastructure here at Bluefield University,” Hershey said. “The issues we face are actually very common for religiously-based liberal arts institutions. I am slowly and methodically putting in place a professional team and a durable system that will move from the previous culture of reactionism, which has been the dominant culture in the facilities industry for decades, to a new culture that will be professional, proactive and positive in all that we do so that Bluefield University’s facility infrastructure will service not only its students and staff, but the whole of everyone we engage in the world as salt and light.”