Ardolf faces maintenance issues, complaints

The Ardolf Science Center at CSB temporarily closed for labs and classes last week due to an air compressor failure that led to a cautionary evacuation of students and staff.

Ardolf closed for classes on Tuesday, reopened Wednesday morning before closing for the remainder of the day and remained closed on Thursday. Classes and labs in the building were moved to Zoom or other asynchronous options for the duration of the closure.

Students affected by the closure received emails from the office of the chief operating officer Wednesday evening, stating that a mechanical component of the building’s air circulation compressor system failed, and students and faculty were evacuated out of an abundance of caution. The compressor allowed air to be circulated through the building and ensured any chemical exhaust was removed from the air through fume hoods in lab areas.

The chair of the chemistry department, Alicia Peterson, said the compressor failure and repair was relatively commonplace and routine, and safety monitors and engineers are consistently watching the equipment in Ardolf to fix something if need be.

“They continually check things, just like how you bring your car in for general maintenance all the time, because sometimes stuff breaks. It’s all on a general maintenance schedule,” Peterson said. “Everything has been checked and is in working order, and there shouldn’t be any further issues, but things do come up.”

Ganard Orionzi, director of environmental health and safety, stated that the age of the air compressor contributed to the failure, and a new one was ordered immediately.

“We were not really sure why it failed or when it would fail again. We wanted to make sure that the new compressor arrives and is in place in case the old one misbehaves and we run into this problem again,” Orionzi said. “[Closing the building] was just an abundance of precaution until the new compressor was in place.”

CSB senior and chemistry TA Sonja Hoversten said the fix was intended to work in the background of classes, but that plan didn’t pan out.

“They had tried to do some routine maintenance without turning the system off, and then that didn’t work…so they did unexpectedly have to turn the entire system off,” Hoversten said. “There was a little bit where [the airflow] was going backwards, so it was kind of funky and smelly in there. The good thing about chemical safety is that you can always smell the chemicals…it starts to have a scent to it.”

Peterson said that while the building closure was less than ideal, it was necessary to make sure they could complete the repairs safely.

“It was stressful for students and for us [faculty] while we were closed, but I think everyone worked through it,” Peterson said.