Chilled Water Pipe Repairs Continue

Infrastructure and Sustainability (I&S) will begin work today to repair the chilled water pipe under Cherry Street in Harrison Square. This project will help address a significant system disruption that is the primary cause of the recent chilled water system outage. When repaired, normal service should be restored to all affected campus buildings.

“There is a massive 24-inch-diameter pipe more than 20 feet deep under Cherry Street that feeds the west campus from the Holland Chiller Plant and needs to be repaired immediately,” said Jim Stephens, interim vice president for I&S. “Much of the work our team has been doing since December has been to install or replace chilled water system valves so that this exact work could be performed safely and with minimal disruption. While we planned to repair this pipe during the cooler months later this fall, the recent unplanned failure requires us to act now.” 

Repairing this pipe will necessitate closing Cherry Street from Ferst Drive to Bobby Dodd Way. Vehicular and pedestrian traffic will be prohibited in this area during construction. An anticipated timeline for completing this repair will be determined once crews examine the pipe and better understand the scope of the damage.

In addition to the pipe repair in Harrison Square, the I&S team has begun to bring the chilled water system online for several buildings. It may take a few days to restore service to these buildings fully, and the focus remains on addressing service to the research buildings. Currently, buildings shown on the map in purple are receiving intermittent chilled water while those in red remain out of service. Buildings in blue remain functional.

Stephens added, “Our teams are dedicated to minimizing this disruption to the best of our ability. I am very grateful to everyone in the campus community for coming together to act quickly and mitigate the effect on our people, operations, and mission-critical work. “

 Visit the Chilled Water Outage webpage for regular updates and a building status list.