Recently, a hole in the Hess lawn gaped open, mounds of dirt piled up, and a team of workers quietly installed a new backup pipeline for Deerfield’s heating system.
Dave Purington, Director of Facilities Operations, summarized how the current heating system “delivers steam from the gym to the Main School Building [MSB].” He added, “Then the steam is used to heat the MSB, Kendall, Arms, and the Hess. The previous delivery system was failing. The pipes that we were building are now the backup if the other one fails.”
Yet beyond the simple appearance and explanation of the construction site, there was months of careful planning and hard work behind the scenes.
This summer, the first backup pipeline began to fail. According to Mr. Purington, the school’s graduation tent accidentally cracked and rusted the pipe. He further explained, “It’s critical to have reliable heat. We didn’t discover all of the failures until late in the summer, and it was just too late to start the project before we were welcoming students. We needed time to plan the project, buy materials, and schedule the project. We [made] appropriate progress every day, [and tried to prevent] truckloads of materials [from being stuck due to] supply-chain problems.”
From 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. for roughly two weeks, the Deerfield Facilities Department, the Grounds Department, and the vendor, The Moran Company, worked together on the pipeline.
The process of installing the new pipeline is easier said than done, and requires complex physics and engineering. Mr. Purington explained, “Certainly the first step was to remove the failed pipe.” He explained, “We needed to dig the ditch, uncover it, cut the ends, lift it out of the ground, and build a bridge across the sidewalk.”
Mr. Purington added that welding and putting in the new pipeline was even harder: “The thing that most people don’t recognize when they’re walking by is that the pipe is very carefully placed in. The ground that the pipe is sitting on is sloped, very carefully pitched because steam has to drain by gravity. Everything has to be consistently pitched. We can’t just dig a hole and put the pipe in. Part of the pipe even has a bend, which is called the expansion loop.” At the expansion loop, the metal has to be predictably heated from the air temperature outside to the hot temperature of a tea kettle that produces steam. In this way, the pieces of pipe around the expansion loop will get longer and bend. Finally, the pipe is pressure tested and isolated to make sure the joints work well, the hole is backfilled, and the site is cleaned up.
All this work is supposed to go unnoticed. Mr. Purington explained, “The way [the pipeline] will impact campus is you’ll never know that something has changed. Right now we’re already delivering heat to the Main School Building. If we decide to switch from using the backup line, we will just continue delivering heat to the buildings. People in the buildings will never know it changed, which is the whole goal of the backup plan. We have heard nothing [about the construction site], which is good news. That means the construction team has done a good job of not creating a nuisance. And in the past, people have talked about it being too loud.”
Although the installation goes unnoticed, it’s meaningful to realize that there’s more behind the scenes of a gaping hole and a big pile of dirt. After all, even this article captures only a fraction of this complex project.
