The large hole in the Campus Center courtyard will likely remain uncovered and marked off with caution tape through the first week of April while Maintenance and Operations determines if they will fix a leaking pipe, or completely replace and reroute it.
Maintenance workers were first alerted to a pool of rust-colored water forming in the courtyard of the Campus Center on the morning of March 19. After a preliminary examination of the scene, and consulting some plans, they determined that the water was most likely the result of a broken underground pipe.
A jackhammer was brought in, and workers began digging through the concrete surface of the courtyard in an attempt to locate the leak. By the morning of the next day, the leak had been located and isolated.
“It’s one of the old steel chiller lines that carries water to the cooling systems for the SGA offices and newspaper classrooms,” Keith Keevil, manager of Maintenance and Operations, said. “We turned on the cooling for the time this year and we got a leak.”
Keevil stressed that the leaking pipe is not a part of the “chiller loop.””That system is just fine,” he said.The college is currently looking at options that may include replacing the whole pipe, and rerouting it to the roof of the building. “We don’t want to just patch this leak and then have to dig it up again somewhere else two months down the road,” Keevil said. But he does caution that the costs of such an extensive project may force them to just temporally repair the existing pipe.”That’s why we are leaving the hole open for now, so we can have contractors come and bid on the job,” Keevil said. “But we’ll cover it as soon as we can, even if it is with steel plates, just to keep things safe.”Keevil pointed out that his office is working with a sense of urgency to get the system repaired and operating. “We could just cap it off and fix it somewhere down the road, but who knows when it will hit 90 degrees,” he said.