Impressive Fragility

In our day to day lives we take for granted the complex infrastructure that underpins our lives. An incredibly delicate web, really, of systems that are interdependent on each other. The last couple days at work have shown what happens when just one of these systems has a hiccup.

I work on lab equipment, cooler/freezers and building mechanical systems at a Big Ten university. I'm blessed to have a job I truly look forward to going to 90% of the time, lots of variety.

Among other things, we repair -80C freezers used for long term preservation of samples. They're big, expensive and break down every 3 - 5 years on average. Requiring about $1500 of parts to properly repair - 2 new compressors, new oil separator, 30' of capillary tubing and two high pressure shut off valves to ease future repairs. One of the labs had one go down a couple weeks ago at a very critical time and are desperate to have it running again, so we've done our best to hurry up the process which usually takes about a week once all the parts have arrived.

Well, I'm getting a bit sidetracked. Here we are in a side room off one of our large equipment rooms in the basement working away on this thing and poof we loose power. Gives new meaning to dark. Thankfully, the emergency generator worked, and after 30 sec or so about every 5th light in the hallways came back on. Just enough to see our tool cart and dig out our two flashlights.

So began a very interesting afternoon. First off, make sure no one stuck in the elevators - amazing no one in any of the three in our building. Go check the environmental rooms, all in alarm of course. Silence all the alarms and turn off the older units so they won't all come back on at the same instant and make a big power surge . . . gurgle, gurgle . . . Hmmm what's that? Steam coming out of the drain pipes!?!

Side note [The pumps in our building that pump the steam condensate back to the power plant on campus broke down a couple weeks ago so the pump shop took the pumps away and in the mean time are dumping the condensate down the drain]

I go in the main mechanical room and find steam and water blasting out of this drain pipe, whole room so hot and full of steam it fogs up my glasses. Try to shut off the steam supply to our building, can't budge the valves. Remember seeing the steam guys use a pipe wrench as an extension. Find ours, not big enough, find a bigger one, brace myself against the air compressor and push as hard as I can. I think it moved, push again, yes it did. Get all three lines shut off, after about 10 minutes rush of steam comes to a stop. You see, many big buildings use compressed air to operate the temperature controls. Remember those thermostats in school that hissed sometimes? No electricity, no air compressor. No air compressor, no controls. No controls, all the steam valves go wide open. We prop the door open and open up some access panels to help air out the room.

You get the picture. Without electricity the delicate web of services in our building ceased to work, making the building almost uninhabitable. No lights, computers, elevators, water on the upper floors (buildings over 3 or 4 stories need booster pumps for the upper floors) or mechanical ventilation for all the interior labs and offices. Everyone went home, out of the 200 or so people that work in our building, only 20 of us left when the power came back on 2 hours later.

In the end we ended up having two blackouts, two days in a row. Looks like they've got things ironed out now at our campus power plant. The news said the second outage caused by attempts to fix the problem that caused the first outage. How would you like to be that guy?

"Welcome home sweetheart, can you believe it, they had a second power outage today, isn't that just terrible? Ya. How'd your day go? Not so good. I'm sorry to her that honey, what happened? Well, me and Paul set out to work on the boiler that went down yesterday you see. Uh, huh. Ya, well anyway, I was real tired from everything yesterday and turned off the wrong one. Oh dear, let me give you a big hug ..."

Whenever this kind of thing happens it reminds me of how little it takes to throw our modern lives out of wack. It also reminds me of how much the Iraqis have suffered over the past 10 years or so. They had a very modern, middle class society w/ technologically advanced cities, top notch hospitals, . . . What would we do if we went from what we enjoy now to only having electricity 3 or 4 hours a day, water that doesn't always work, sewage sometimes backing up into our houses or 4 hour waits to get gas for our cars?

This post not meant as a commentary on the Iraq war, but just a reminder of how much we really have, and the delicate chorus that goes on behind the scenes that keeps the shelves full of every fruit and vegetable year round, home improvement centers fully stocked with goods, water safe to drink at virtually every faucet, electricity 24/7, our online purchases arriving at our front door within 2 days of placing the order, . . . humbling isn't it?