Antiquated heating falters in record cold

On Mon., Jan. 24, New Haven awoke to above-freezing temperatures for only the fifth time this year. As the mercury inched past the 32-degree mark, the snow began to melt and people started to shed their heavy winter clothing.

At Yale, though, it was a different story. Even though afternoon temperatures were higher than they had been in weeks, many students inside their dorm rooms or classrooms weren't feeling the heat—at all. The University once again became a victim of cold winter weather, with a burst pipe in the Pierson-Sage Garage on Science Hill and continued heating problems in the Silliman dining hall, Pierson, and several dorms on Old Campus.

CAYTE PUSHKAREVA/YH Yale's power plant is trying to warm things up.

"Our problems are virtually unending," Joanna Dolgin, MC '03, said. Dolgin's suite in Welch Hall was completely flooded on Tues., Jan. 18, when a pipeline burst on the fifth floor. She still does not have heat in her room. "There's a hole in the ceiling of a fourth floor bathroom, dirty showers, leaking sinks, and broken toilets," Dolgin said. "I don't understand why they haven't been fixed yet."

And, by the end of last week, many students were echoing Dolgin's concerns—why has Yale, with its enormous endowment and commitment to renovating buildings, been so slow to repair widespread heating failures?

"Our systems have just been extremely overburdened during these very cold weeks," Hank O'Neill, superintendent of Yale's Physical Plant Control Center, said. "We've been working very hard to fix things, but we're faced with more and more problems every day." According to O'Neill, many of Yale's heating systems are outdated. While water heats newer structures on campus, older buildings—including Pierson, Davenport, and Trumbull—are heated by steam.

In these older colleges, a single room on the second floor of each entryway is equipped with a thermostat that controls heating in all rooms above and below it. "A critical inefficiency of the old system is that one room controls the temperature for the entire entryway," O'Neill said. "So if one student on the second floor accidentally leaves a window open, then the rest of the people in the entryway will have to suffer oppressively hot rooms."

For students in Pierson, however, oppressive heat is the exact opposite of their problems. Since Wed., Jan. 19, heating for much of the college hasn't been working, and many students have been given space heaters to ease their discomfort.

O'Neill explained that problems in Pierson may be attributed to several factors, including clogged heating pipes or failed valves. But the main problem, according to O'Neill, is the propensity of certain heating systems to become overburdened and break down. "When it gets extremely cold, we push systems to their limits, and sometimes you just can't prevent mishaps," he said.

Not even newer systems preclude frigid dorm rooms. Berkeley, Jonathan Edwards, Morse, and Ezra Stiles, along with Farnam, Lawrance, and Vanderbilt Halls are equipped with updated heating, which pumps hot water through vertical pipes directly to the radiators of a given entryway's suites. Yet this technology has gone to waste in buildings such as Vanderbilt, where many students have found themselves wearing hats and gloves in their rooms. "It's been absolutely freezing in my suite for the past few weeks," Swati Salgaocar, BK '03, said. "I can't sit in my common room without a jacket on."

That's because Vanderbilt's windows haven't been changed for years, and gaps in their frames allow drafts to flow through. To slow the problem, Yale's physical plant has offered to put up temporary plastic storm windows behind existing glass panes, but according to some students living in Vanderbilt, they aren't perfect. "The plastic works and my room is definitely warmer, but I'm still not really pleased," Katie Kline, BK '03, said. "If I ever want to open my window for some reason, then I have to completely remove the temporary windows first."

Sillimanders are also feeling winter's cold grip. Their dining hall has been without heat for the past week and a half, forcing students to bundle up at meals. "We've got space heaters, and we're putting out 10-gallon containers of hot chocolate every day," Michael Aaronian, Silliman dining hall manager, said. "I'd like to know myself when all of this is going to be fixed." As of Wed., Jan. 19, though, the physical plant still wasn't sure about the answer to that question.

"We're getting heat calls day and night as a matter of course, so we're never caught up 100 percent," O'Neill said. To Aaronian, though, that excuse isn't acceptable. "Yale is definitely behind the eight ball on this one," he said. "The only reason things have been getting any better in [the dining hall] is because the temperature outside is becoming a little more bearable. For now, I'm going to stick with the hot chocolate."

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