Oakland University students are getting an extended Thanksgiving break thanks to a water leak.
In-person classes are cancelled this week as the school works to repair the steam system that provides heat to more than 20 buildings across campus. Online classes and clinical classes held off campus are not affected, the school said.
Wilson Hall and Eliott Tower can be seen on the Oakland University main campus in Rochester on Wednesday, March 13, 2019.
The school operates a main boiler that heats water into steam and pumps it through a network of pipes to the various buildings. In late October, technicians who monitor the system around the clock noticed it was consuming too much water.
“They saw that the water consumption in the boilers was spiking,” said Steve Mackey, senior vice president of finance and administration. “It went way up, and it was sustained and in a closed loop system, they instantly knew they had a break somewhere.”
The technicians found the leak in a pipe a few hundred feet from the boiler itself. Mackey said most of the system has redundancies built into it, but this section of pipe dates to the early days of the university in the late 1950s and wasn’t built with a backup.
“We had it scheduled to be repaired and fixed in the next five years,” Mackey said. “Unfortunately, it decided it didn’t want to wait on our timeline.”
At its peak, the leak was losing 6,000 gallons of water a day, Mackey said.
As a temporary workaround, system operators lowered the temperature and the pressure within the pipe to slow the loss, but that reduced the temperature in the buildings that count on that steam for heat. Mackey said they had hoped to limp through the remainder of the term and fix it over the December break, but with colder weather coming and temperatures in the buildings falling, they had to act sooner.
With this being a short week because of the holiday, the school scheduled the repair now to minimize the disruption to the classes, spokesman Brian Bierley said.
Mackey said crews are working through the week, and they expect to have the system fixed and pressured up by Sunday evening, in time for classes to resume Monday morning.
Among the buildings affected by the closure is the Meadow Brook Theatre, which was staging “A Christmas Carol” to kick off its holiday season. The closure forced the cancellation of several shows.
“We did explore trying to heat the theater independently,” Mackey said. “It was just cost-prohibitive and then we weren’t going to be able to heat the bathrooms and the hallways. We all agreed as a team… that it is probably best for the experience, for the safety of everybody that we, unfortunately, we had to cancel those shows.”
The theatre said in an announcement on its website that it plans to resume performances on Wednesday, Dec. 3 and that people who had tickets for the cancelled shows could exchange them for other shows at no cost.
Contact John Wisely: jwisely@freepress.com. On X: @jwisely
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Water leak gives Oakland University students a surprise extended break