In January, the team working on installing a new tunnel vault for the planned Clinical Inpatient Tower (CIT) came across a problem. They uncovered a section of an old steam line take-off to the former Kresge building that prevented them from constructing a portion of the new chamber. 

In order to keep the project moving, the steam to this section of piping had to be shut off so that they could cut off this obstruction and weld a cap on the line. Complicating matters was the fact that this section of piping was part of the system feeding the Medical Campus.

As you can imagine, shutting off a major steam line feeding the medical complex in the middle of winter during a pandemic was not ideal. In fact, to anyone’s knowledge, this had never been tried before. Yet before long, the CIT project team had a sound plan to accommodate this outage. 

 They performed a test outage while Central Power Plant staff constantly monitored the steam system. The test went well, but on the day of the actual outage, it was colder and they could not hold steam pressure. 

Undeterred by this setback, the team quickly got together to troubleshoot the issue. Soon, they had a solution in place that isolated the piping while maintaining stable steam service to the Medical Campus. The CIT team removed the interference and the project continued without an inconvenient and potentially expensive pause in construction.  

“It was really wonderful to watch the perseverance of this team and their unwillingness to give up,” said Brian Hall, interim Utilities director. “This is another great example of our guiding principles of solutions-based and team collaboration put into action.”