A mechanical flaw caused a 30,000-gallon spill in the Engineering Centers Building Friday morning, causing water damage throughout the building, according to a University statement. Around 5 a.m., two chilled air coils that run through the air-handling systems froze, flooding the top floor.
'There was a malfunction with a digital controller, and that's what caused the temperature inside the unit to go below 32, which caused the coil to freeze,' physical plant Associate Director Faramarz Vakili said.
According to Vakili the coils were part of a campus-wide temperature-control system that pipes about 2 million gallons of chilled water throughout the campus, used to cool campus buildings. The water continuously cycles via the physical plant, and it was plant employees who discovered the flooding and contacted police at about 6:30 a.m. Friday, according to the police report.
'The amount of water returning to the power plant was noticeably less than what there was supposed to be,' Vakili said. 'That means that there's a leak somewhere.'
Plant employees and UW-Madison police located the leakage and closed the building.
The leak was in the top level of the Engineering Centers Building, and water seeped through the floor and down to the second and first levels of the building.
The most severe damage was done to 12 'clean rooms' used for scientific research requiring a clean environment. Vakili said each room uses a high-efficiency particulate air filter worth $20,000 to clean the air. 'If those filters have been damaged, that's a costly proposition,' Vakili said. 'I think if they are all damaged, we're talking about somewhere around $300,000.'
But Vakili also said experts were scheduled to examine the HEPA filters and stressed the exact cost of the damages has not been determined.
'To the best of my knowledge, just those clean rooms are out of service,' he said. 'Everything else is just fine.'
