Students were notified about an emergency steam shutdown taking place on campus, to fix up a minor leak on Sept. 17. It is advised that they plan to clean up the day before to avoid any disturbance in nightly routines.

Several area coordinators send out email notifications to the following residence halls: Stopher, Johnson, Olson, Beall, McDowell, Korb and Leebrick. As a result, students have time to prepare before the event occurs. 

As they proceed with this process, the water will be shut off from 12:01 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“In many buildings across campus, there may be reduced or no hot water for a few hours in the middle of the night,” Eric Mansfield, Assistant Vice President of University Communications and Marketing said.

Mansfield said there is a university steam shutdown that happens annually across campus. Usually this takes place in May, after students are graduating and right before the start of any summer classes that are in session.

This shutdown occurs as a routine check up on the maintenance and happens on a yearly basis. There is a power plant that can be located using the University map which powers a lot of the campus systems, one being the water system. The annual maintenance check is done to be sure that the power plant is running properly and not experiencing any issues or damages.

However, in this case the situation is different and happened more suddenly, according to Mansfield. 

“This upcoming shutdown that is planned for Sept. 17 is because we found a small leak on a feed waterline on one of the pumps that supplies water to the boilers,” Mansfield said. “Therefore, this means there will be no water flowing into the residence halls.” 

The steam is the component that heats up the water which flows into the buildings on campus. Since there will be an outage of steam, the water must be shut down to deal with the leak. 

They are conducting the operation in several hours during the night. So with the repairs overnight, Mansfield said it will not take a long time to fix the leak.

“We hope that by fixing it overnight, it will lessen the impact on students,” Mansfield said. “It’s likely that most students will not be impacted or even notice a short disruption in service.”

Naudia Harris is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected]