EDITOR’S NOTE: The interview featured in this article took place on Dec. 9 at 2 p.m. At 4 p.m., Oakland University’s Campus Communications sent out an email informing the community of a third leak on the high temperature hot water (HTHW) system due to fluctuating pressure and heat.

The contents of this interview reflect the information provided by interviewees before notice of the third leak was published. 

Modified university operations and closed buildings will remain necessary until further notice. Fall 2025 Commencement will take place as planned.

On Tuesday, Dec. 9, The Oakland Post sat down with Oakland University administration to discuss the university’s response to the high temperature hot water (HTHW) pipe failure. Amy Thompson, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost, and Stephen Mackey, senior vice president for finance and administration and treasurer to the board of trustees, provided valuable insight into the situation. 

On Monday, Nov. 10, OU communications announced that the campus would be closed beginning Nov. 21 through Nov. 30 due to emergency repairs. Following a second pipe failure, the closure has since been extended throughout the new year. Campus is expected to reopen to operate “business as usual” in January.

The interview was conducted via an online format per the administration’s request. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Oakland Post: Will commencement be conducted as planned on Dec. 12 and 13? Will the heating systems be running in the O’Rena for the occasion?  

Thompson: We are excited to make sure that commencement is happening. We want to make sure that our students can go through the ceremony, so it is going on as planned.

The Oakland Post: Could you give any more specifics about that? Like, how is the building being heated? Obviously, given the pipe failure, students graduating want to know more specifics about the heating and how that facility will operate on that day.

Mackey: We’ve run two tests in the O’Rena. We’ve had two, three basketball games in the facility. Our teams have been in there working on bringing in an enormous amount of temporary heat and, I mean, a lot. So it’s millions of BTUs. It’s very, very hot in some sections of that building, because the air has to move through the building to get to the O’Rena. 

The other thing that we’ve been very, very close and monitoring and trying to work the engineering out on is to make sure that the air turnover is proper. The way in which we’re keeping the building completely heated is basically you seal a building up, so we’re only allowing one point of entry. So we’re changing the way the staging happens. We’re changing a bunch of the operations for commencement, the stuff that people don’t see. We’re changing a lot of that.

The other thing is, because the O’Rena is attached to the Rec Center, so the Rec Center is also part of this envelope. So you tighten up that envelope nice and tight. We’re going to have it nice and warm in there. We’ll open up those doors and then as the people come in, each person, I think, generates 180 BTUs per hour. So those bodies, the 3000 4000 bodies that we have in there, generate a lot of heat as well. That’s all calculated in this to handle the air turnover. 

With all of that said, we feel very comfortable, especially with the basketball games being our test. We feel very comfortable about where we stand and the heating plan that we have because we’ve tested it.

The Oakland Post: When did the university become aware of a problem with the High Temperature Hot Water System (HTHW) pipes? The HTHW piping replacement and improvement project was approved in August 2020, with a leak identified in Spring 2020. Is this the same problem that came up this year? Can you give us background on that? 

Mackey: The 2022 [2020] was specifically the same kind of thing in a completely different section of pipe. So the expansion joint failed and it was on the section that fed Pawley Hall. So Pawley Hall was the only building affected at that time. So it’s very different. This is a very different section, completely unrelated, but same kind of problem with the aging infrastructure in the system.

The Oakland Post: My follow-up is for this specific section that caused the problems this year. When did the university become aware of that?

Mackey: We were made aware of [the pipe leak] the 21st of October. It took me one day to plan, gather and call the emergency meeting with all the powers that be. 

When we discovered it, what we did was we pulled the temperature down in the system as much as possible. We pulled the pressure down in the system as much as possible to keep the campus running. 

But you’ll recall, it wasn’t that cold then and so we were there. The buildings were a little cooler than normal, but we were able to get through. That’s why when we did the emergency closure for the week [of Nov. 24] we were happy to be on Thanksgiving, we were limping along. 

Before that, we were afraid it was going to get cold after Thanksgiving and we wouldn’t have made it through to winter break. Obviously, with the way the weather’s turned out these last couple of weeks, we would have never made it through. So it was definitely the right call and I feel pretty good about the decisions we made when we made them.

The Oakland Post: What factors were taken into consideration for the partial campus closure planned for the week of Thanksgiving? Was it the holiday break offering a couple of days? Was it decided that Thanksgiving was the best time? Or was it engineering-related? 

Mackey: When we initially called the campus closure, part of it was that we had a lead time of about 11 days just to get the replacement part. During that 11-day period, we were still open for part of it. Because we didn’t know how we were going to fix it — we had to engineer that. 

Literally, the engineers have designed an entirely different type of heat expansion sleeve and it required a complete re-engineering of all the structural [infrastructure] in the tunnels and everything else. It took us quite a while to get the plans done after the first one, so when we went into Thanksgiving break, we felt really good about being able to open the following week. The project kind of just worked out that way. 

As we started to heat it up and on our second day of heating, we got the system almost up to about 175 degrees, and we saw another section, a different expansion loop, failed. That happened because they’re old, and when you cool them down, and you heat them back up, if there’s any cracks or any weaknesses in them at all, they get exposed. So had the second crack not appeared, we would have been open right after Thanksgiving break, but we had another break and so here we are.

The Oakland Post: That second crack in the pipe, could that have been prevented?

Mackey: There’s no way to prevent it. We could have prevented it, had we been funding the deferred maintenance for the past 20 years. So there’s a deferred maintenance problem and the problem is in these expansion joints, where it’s failing, there’s no way to inspect it. So we’re able to inspect 95% of the piping and the 5% of these expansion joints they go out and they leave the tunnel and they go underground. We have no way to inspect those areas underground. So if it’s not leaking, it’s good. If it starts leaking, it’s not good. And that’s kind of the it’s just it is what it is. 

We have a special chemical in the water and the treatment in the heating plant, so we can test the water in a leak to see if it’s natural water, just seeping through the ground, or if it’s actually coming out of the hot water, the out of the pipes. That’s how we know if it’s a leak, if it’s a cracked pipe. 

The other compounding factor on this is these pipes are double sleeved, so these two sleeves, the inside one could be failing or have failed and you wouldn’t know it and then the outside one fails, so they both have to fail. We have two pipes in there, so we don’t know where the cracks are at necessarily. It could be cracked on the outside and not be leaking. It could be cracked on the inside and not leaking. They both have to crack. It’s these thermal dynamics that cause all these leaks to get exposed.

The Oakland Post: How much have the repairs of the HTHW cost OU this year? Have adjacent expenditures arisen because of the repairs, like the heating equipment to maintain temperature in buildings, relocating students, or any others that the average student wouldn’t think about?

Mackey: I’ll start with the student refunds. The students who were in the dorms, who were affected, who have moved back home, they’re being prorated their full tuition, room and board for the days that we’ve been closed. So I think it started on that Friday before Thanksgiving, so they should be seeing those credits posted to their accounts probably next week, early next week is probably when they’ll be posted. 

There were a handful of students, I think a total of 10, who opted for premium rooms, so they had single rooms and they moved into other dorms on campus. So we’re prorating their refund for the difference in that premium room charge. So they’re also receiving a credit to their account as well. We were just finishing up those calculations. We will be posting those to the student accounts, so you should see them getting posted in the next week or so. I think the students who have been impacted by that have already received emails notifying them with their refunds coming. That cost was $850,000 approximately, maybe a little bit more.

The cost of the repairs to this point, along with the heating, is about $1.1 million so far. I’m not sure where we’re going to end up at. So this is just where we’re at. So we’re still working very hard and trying to keep everything running and keep the buildings from freezing. 

The Oakland Post: In regard to this money and the payments, is all of this something that the Board of Trustees has to approve, or who checks the plan, the expenditure, in all of these decisions?

Mackey: I have authorization for expenditures up to a million dollars. The president has authorization for expenditures up to $2.5 million and after that, we have to go to the Board of Trustees. For emergency orders, the president can approve above the $2.5 million for emergency purposes. Then we can get the board together to review and approve it, so we haven’t had to do that.

The Oakland Post: The money that you’re drawing from these repairs, is it from a general emergency fund, or is there anywhere, specifically, where you’re getting that from?

Mackey: We have decided, rather than to drain our emergency fund — the markets have been performing exceedingly well — we’re taking this from our capital gains fund. We’re not draining our rainy day fund, which we’re still replenishing from COVID. So we’re still not where we really want to be, but we’ve been lucky enough to have remarkable market performance and we’re able to cover it without passing that cost on to the students.

The Oakland Post: Who conducted the HTHWS repairs? Was it a third party, OU workers, or a combination of both? 

Mackey: It’s a hybrid of both. It’s a total team effort. We have a company, their name is Johnny E. Green. They’re the construction firm and then and they’re also doing some of the design. We have a couple of different engineering firms working on the engineering. We have mechanical engineers and we have structural engineers working on all the designs and figuring out how to anchor all of this stuff. 

The dynamics of this significantly change because we’re bypassing the expansion loops now. So the structural and mechanical engineering are radically, radically different, but we can get into those details when we go visit the site. We do not have welding crews on site, so we have to hire the welding crews. We do not have steelworkers within our skilled trades, so we have to hire the steelworkers. So we’re hiring out those specialized skills.

The Oakland Post: How was the maintenance staff impacted by the partial campus closing? What other workers saw their schedules or tasks change with the partial closing? Were they able to work remote hours? If not, who was coming in to work on site?

Thompson: For the most part, we made sure that there was staff coverage in the various buildings, but we were on a limited basis. We wanted to make sure that the students who were on campus were always served. But we did have a large portion of our workforce working remotely during this time.

The Oakland Post: Have you received any feedback from faculty, students or staff regarding the situation? The reactions are mixed and they have been changing throughout the days. But can you give us some insight into your experience?

Thompson: First of all, let me just say obviously that all of this has been, kind of limited to the impacted buildings, because we still have residence halls, we still have the Human Health Building, for example, that were not impacted. So, we did have a significant number of people still remaining in those areas. I would say for the most part, everyone has been very understanding, very patient. 

As Steve kind of brought up before, there’s no real way we could have anticipated that this was going to happen. So, yes, we’ve had to pivot. Yes, we’ve had to inconvenience some students with this, but we’ve done everything we can to try to make this right. 

The students who were in the residence halls, for example, are being notified that some of their housing fees will be prorated and refunded. We will also do similar things with meal plans. Steve has done a great job, for example, trying to provide free meals on campus in areas where students are taking exams. So we deeply care about our students and the student experience at OU and I think for the most part, people have been appreciative and very patient through this. 

Mackey: I mean, overall, the feedback I’ve received has been one; we’ve been pretty transparent about this whole thing and people really do appreciate knowing what’s going on. I think that’s been the number one feedback that I’ve gotten. 

I think the second thing is that we’re trying to illustrate our values by taking care of our people and the trades and all these people who run the grounds and do all this stuff, they’ve been here the whole time. They don’t get to take days off. And the police department, there are all these groups that are kind of behind the scenes, they are just giving it everything they’ve got every single day to accommodate the people who have needs. I mean, there are some people who have to come to campus. We have operations that are in these buildings that have to continue and our teams are here. And I can tell you that the people that they’re serving, they are very thankful that they’re getting support that they’re getting, because I hear it from them.

Overall, like Amy said, the overall feedback has been very positive for the most part. It’s just a series of unfortunate events and the weather has just been completely unpredictable for early December, late November. It’s just that’s been the biggest challenge — the weather. But I think that people, the students, the faculty, the staff, everybody has just stepped up. It’s just been really, really refreshing for me to see all the different units kind of just really go beyond the normal daily efforts, especially this week during finals. This has been exceedingly difficult for everybody.

The Oakland Post: What were some of the most challenging choices made regarding the HTHWS repairs, communications and campus closing?

Thompson: I’ll just say, on my side of the office of Academic Affairs, we had to move over 200 classes so that was kind of like Jenga, right? You’ve got to find the right size, the right time slot for things. We were very fortunate to have our West Center, that we could utilize our partners in the community; Macomb Community College, Oakland Community College, both offered up space for us.

In fact, on Friday, we have thousands of students taking their math exams, for example, over at OCC so everyone has been incredibly helpful. At least on my side, Steve’s had lots of different challenges, I think from a facility side, just trying to get everybody moved over, communicate it again, make sure we’re very transparent. Some students, for example, use the testing center so we had to make sure that it had heat and that we could accommodate lots of different things on the back end.

Mackey: I mean, it’s been a series of very difficult decisions, but it really was what I would classify as the first decision. And the first decision was, do we take the chance on this system making it through December 13 or do we take it offline and deal with the disruption to the entire community? That was the hardest decision to make because the repercussions are so big.

It was one thing when it was three days and we threaded that needle; and when that repair worked and worked exactly as designed and we had another failure. The next hardest decision was, okay, how do we switch to a hybrid modality for the whole university and then it’s stretching into finals week? And how do we deal with that? How do we deal with commencement? Then the dominoes start falling. But the first decision and it was so hard, because failure would have meant total catastrophe and no university operations at all. So that was the hardest decision — to call the team together, call the president together and make a recommendation that we close.

Thompson: It would have been probably a different conversation had it been warmer. But it’s so cold that this has even taxed our system even more. I think that kind of highlighted the urgency of this, because some of the days that this was leading up to this, the temperature was like 10 degrees or 12 degrees, so it even taxed the system even more.

Mackey: Well, before we took the system offline, I don’t think it got below like 28,  so it was holding okay, but as it started cooling off, we started seeing the leaks accelerate. Then when we closed the campus down, the teams all felt that we didn’t need to heat the buildings. I told them, “I don’t care if we’re going to heat the buildings.” And you get all these extra supplemental heat in here, because I didn’t want to take the chance of an ice storm coming through here. That was the right decision, but, boy, it panned out to be really the right decision after we had that second leak and we’ve had to heat these buildings for this extended period of time

The Oakland Post: What actions are being taken to ensure that mishaps like the second leak in the HTHWS do not happen again?

Mackey: We do have a deferred maintenance plan. We are working on that. A lot of that is really driven by these capital-funded projects with the state. South Foundation, Hall, Dodge Hall, those kinds of projects where we’re doing those big, massive renovations on these buildings, on the older buildings.

What we’re doing right now — this is, this is going to be hot off the press — is we are in the process of sourcing boilers, independent boilers, for every building, so that if we do have a catastrophic failure again, we’re able to heat the buildings to an occupancy level and not disrupt the entire university operations. So we are putting in a redundant system. It’s not efficient, but it’s redundant. That’s part one of this. We’re going to have that system up and running before the winter term starts. So we’ve got 22 boilers we’re going to be installing over the next three weeks. Part two of this is obviously getting the loop fixed, getting it up and running. Then, phase three of this is coming summer, we’re going to install a new redundant line that will make it so that we no longer have a single point of failure in the system. So it’s a multi-tiered fix and it’s all very expensive.

The Oakland Post: Do we have a projection of how much is it going to cost or not yet?

Mackey: No, not yet. It’s way too early. We’ve got a lot of engineering work to do, a lot of bidding to do and all that work. So we’ll know more, probably April or June board meetings, you’ll start to see actions on this.

The Oakland Post: As we move into finals, we wind down and prepare for next semester. How can students best support the rest of the administration, the workers who fix the pipe, the workers who arrange the movement of classes and tests and overall, how can we best support all the people working together to bring the university back to normal?

Thompson: That’s a great question and thank you for asking that question. I think the best thing is, again, to just be patient and to understand that we are moving as absolutely fast as we can. The biggest thing is we want to see our students fully back in the winter term and ready to go. So if they have questions, please feel that we’re here. We’re ready to respond. We’re ready to support our students in any way. I mean, we’ve been doing things like providing transportation for students and making sure that they have access to everything that they need. We really are trying to make sure everyone is fully supported. But please encourage students that if there’s problems that arise, that we are here for them fully as a university that cares deeply about our students, faculty and staff.

Mackey: I would love to see the students come back in the winter term and get really engaged. Show up to the basketball games, show up to the sporting events, show up at the OC events, like overwhelm us with attendance. That is the best gratitude you can show. Showing up and just being happy to be there and be part of the community. That’s, to me, the biggest thing I would love to see of the student body come out of this.

The Oakland Post: It’s a month out and we can’t make predictions that far in advance, but do you have any updates for us on how the semester will start? Is it likely that the campus will open or resume business as usual?

Mackey: We are going to be business as usual. Yes, I just, I don’t know how, but we are going to be business as usual. That I do know, unless something drastic happens. I mean, you never know what’s going to happen.