The maintenance staff at Northeast Texas Community College has been busy this semester as a series of water system breakdowns plague the college. Since mid-August, the main campus has been forced to go without water five times due to leaks in its aging water system. Outages have varied from a few hours to more than half a day.
On the morning of Fall Inservice (the one day when all college faculty/staff gather to prepare for the new school year) a major water system break took out the entire campus, leaving the college without running water, working restrooms, and cafeteria services. Administrators altered schedules and provide employees with transportation to restroom facilities at the NTCC Agriculture Complex across the highway, which are on separate water/sewage systems. Other shorter outages since have left employees and students scrambling for off-campus restrooms during work and class hours.
"In addition to our faculty, staff, and regular students, we have more than 200 people who reside on campus full-time during the school year. A water outage means they don't have access to basic facilities and food services," Tim Johnston, NTCC Director of Plant Services, said.
According to Johnston, it is very difficult to isolate the location of a leak when it happens. †Because of this, there is no choice but to shut down water to the entire campus while plant services staff work to find the source of the problem.
?The college lost its basic campus infrastructure maps in a fire a number of years ago. So when breakdowns occur, we have to do a lot of guessing and hole digging until we find the source of the problem. That slows down repairs.† But the real problem is that the system is more than 28 years old now and leaks are inevitable," Johnston said.
The water line problem is just one of a laundry-list of deferred maintenance items that college administrators are looking to address as soon as possible. Engineers hired this past summer to assess the situation have indicated that a complete overhaul of the water system is necessary. The cost to do this is estimated at $2.9 million.
?Our people have been outstanding ? both in their patience with the inconveniences of water outages and in the hard work of plant services to patch the system.† But it is clear we cannot wait much longer before we will have to address our aging infrastructure," Brad Johnson, NTCC President, said.†?The fact is that the college simply does not have the money at this time to permanently fix the problem, so we will continue to patch it until we find the resources to replace the system."
