An electrical fire in the boiler room of The Sullivan Fitness Complex forced over 100 people at the gym and the adjacent day care center to evacuate the building at 12 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. There were no injuries.
The fire was caused by a short circuit in the building’s backup electrical system.
According to the Department of Facilities Management, a hole in one of the aging battery cell casings drained the battery of it’s fuel, creating the short circuit.
The University plans to update the antiquated system sometime next week, says Dave Barbour, Interim Executive Director of DFM. It is unknown how much the project will cost.
The acrid stench of burning plastic was the first thing that anybody noticed at the gym. An unidentified patron informed Lifeline Fitness Administrative Associate Pat Rich that there was a terrible smell in the basement hallway outside the office.
Rich noticed the smell as soon as she opened the door to investigate. She walked down the hallway to find the source. As she neared the boiler room, the smell grew stronger.
“I was coughing, because the smell was gagging me,” she explained.
Rich notified Administrative Manager Wendy Benson-Sargent, who after confirming the odor in the south stairwell, immediately phoned DFM. Although no smoke or fire was visible, Benson-Sargent could tell something was wrong.
“When you’ve been in the building for 10 years, you can tell when something is off,” she explained. Guy Durichek, a mechanical trades worker for DFM, had just started his lunch break at the nearby heating plant when he received the call from dispatch. Benson Sargent lead Durichek to the boiler room, where the source of the smell had since been identified as a small fire along the back wall of the boiler room.
“There were flames coming up from behind the line of batteries right against the wall,” Durichek confirmed
Durichek instructed Benson-Sargent to pull the fire alarm and evacuate the building. Durichek then put the fire out with a nearby extinguisher, and stayed on scene until the Fire Department arrived.
Durichek said that the fire was small, but that prudent action was the best course.
“It wasn’t a raging inferno,” he admitted, “but it was in a very sensitive area. Not knowing what could possibly happen. I thought that would be the proper procedure, just to avoid the disaster of someone getting injured.”
Barbour says that the size and location of the fire were the primary reasons that the fire detection equipment did not alert the building’s occupants of the danger.
Mechanical areas on campus are outfitted with heat detectors, which only go off when temperatures in the room reach a threshold of 160 degrees. The normal operation of some of the equipment in these areas can sometimes produce smoke, explained Barbour, which could result in false alarms if the areas were equipped with smoke detectors.
The age of the batteries is believed to be the prime cause of the fire.
“I would say they were well past their shelf life,” Barbour admitted last Tuesday morning.
Nickel-cadmium batteries such as those in the Sullivan Complex should be replaced every 10 to 12 years, he said.
Barbour estimates that the batteries in question were only replaced once since the complex was built in 1969.
“We test them annually,” he explained. “They were still working and they were still holding a charge, so it wasn’t anything we expected.”
Steve Woodhead of Environmental Safety and Health agrees that the emergency backup system was operating normally when he performed the annual test two days prior to the incident.
The test is done per National Fire Prevention Association guidelines, which require backup systems be run once a year for 90 minutes. He concedes that the test itself may have driven the batteries to failure.
“Maybe that 90 minutes put a load on them or something that they couldn’t handle,” Woodhead said last Wednesday afternoon.
The test of the batteries’ physical integrity is performed by George Pattershall, Assistant Life Safety Systems Supervisor, who said that the age of the batteries has meant that increasing amounts of maintenance is needed to keep them operational.
“The nickel-cadmium batteries, as they age, tend to use more water. so you have to add more and more.”
He added that Life Safety Systems has monitored the system closely, but that age may have finally caught up with the batteries.
“We’ve watched this system, because it uses more water, and needs more care. It’s aged to the point where it’s not worth maintaining.”
DFM has already replaced batteries in Payson Smith Hall and the Law Building. They plan on replacing the current system with decentralized emergency light heads, the same kind that are set up in Luther Bonney Hall. The proposed batteries are fueled by a sealed lead-acid fuel mixture, which is more reliable.
Given the long list of repairs currently on the deferred maintenance list, and the lack of reserve labor, USM may have to subcontract the project to an outside firm, says Barbour.
“It’s an old campus. There’s a lot of deferred maintenance, so things keep breaking down. We’re going to need the staff we have, if not more.”
Barbour does not know how much the project will cost, or how it will paid for, but he stresses that the job is too important to put off.
“We’re going to have to fix it, we have no choice.”