When Jamie Sundsbak came to work Monday morning, it was colder inside his lab than outdoors.
Sundsbak, a lab specialist at the U School of Medicine, arrived at 7:30 a.m. and could see his breath in the lab.
He called the hospital’s facilities and engineering department for a space heater. The hospital keeps several heaters in storage for such occasions.
He was told to be patient because, after all, it is a hospital and there are a lot of rooms that need heaters.
But by 3:30 p.m., when no heater had arrived for the 10 people working in the freezing lab, he made a third phone call only to be told there were none left.
“I called at 7:30 the first time, they just told me to be patient,” Sundsbak said. “I have no problem with patience, but when they said there weren’t any left, I demanded to know they went.”
The freezing temperatures in the lab and throughout the School of Medicine were the result of a broken hot water pipe, said Dave Henry at Plant Operations.
According to Henry, the pipes are 20 to 30 years old and are susceptible to breaking because of their age.
Roger Nafus, of the hospital’s facilities and engineering department, said the pipes have broken four or five times in the past few months.
The lack of heating this past Monday and Tuesday was due to the breakage of a length of pipe that broke in one section on Monday and then again in another section the next day.
Heat was back on this morning, but not without making several people uncomfortable and not without damaging lab equipment.
“We’ve got detergents in our lab that evaporate at cold temperatures. The chemicals fall through the vial like sand through a sift,” said Ron Weiss, who works in a pathology lab.
“There are experiments going on in these labs that are supposed to be at room temperature,” Sundsbak explained. “When the temperature is way below room temperature, that’s a variable that may affect the experiment.”
“We also have $60,000 machines in here that are designed to work at room temperature. We have to let them warm up like a car engine on a cold morning,” Sundsbak said.
After he demanded to know where all the space heaters had gone, Sundsbak was told they were in offices.
“The doctors’ offices were freezing,” said a woman at the head and neck surgery department.
“It was too cold to work,” said Larry Kraiss in pathology. “Even with the space heaters, I couldn’t stay here. I went to my lab in another building to work.”
But Sundsbak thought it was unfair heaters were given to small offices first while a lab with 10 people, delicate equipment and experiments was ignored.
“We had people who wanted to go home, saying it was too cold to work,” he said.
But the patients in the hospital are the top priority for the engineering department, which distributes the heaters, Nafus explained.
“Patient care is number one, the others get what’s left,” said Carlos Arthur, also in facilities and engineering.
The building also had no heat for four days the week after Presidents Day.
“There’s no telling when a pipe might break anywhere on campus,” Henry said.