Imagine where you would like to be at 5:51 on a Saturday morning. The answer probably would not be: standing on the sidewalk of Congress Street, half asleep in the freezing cold. This is where the 277 residents of Portland Hall ended up on January 22 after an early morning fire alarm. The alarm was triggered when a pipe froze and burst, striking a boiler with water. The part of a boiler that controls all of Portland Hall except for the Yankee Clipper wing froze and flooded the boiler room. The water was also shut off until 9 p.m. that day while workers repaired the equipment. The following day an electrical short cut off hot water to the entire building.
“This building does need a lot of work.” said Joy Pufhal, the resident hall coordinator of Portland Hall, “The boiler is an example of our older equipment in this building.” Since A-wing gets heat through forced hot water from the boiler, that part of the building lost heat along with the hot water. According to Pufhal, no students have ever been hurt or suffered any physical ailments due to freezing temperatures causing problems in the boiler room, but some students have remarked on the matter. “Oh I have no heat. Now I’m just going to go back to my cold room” said Katye Allen, an A-wing resident of Portland Hall, “I had an off and on fever and I couldn’t even stay in my own room.”
Boiler problems are not new in Portland Hall. Last winter the boiler froze up because of an outside draft being directed into the boiler room. Facilities Management had to replace a section of the boiler and caused the same problems. A meeting has been scheduled for next week with Facilities Management to decide what to do about the boiler. According to Carl Hill, assistant director of Facility Services, possible ideas for the boiler have been replacing it completely or updating the equipment. “Portland Hall is definitely not a modern building,” said Hill.