Medical Research Building shutdown June 24-26
Update 6/20: View new information on the pending shutdown.
Update 6/15: Do you work in MRB? An open forum will be held Thursday, June 16 from 4 to 5 p.m. in MRB 310 to discuss the upcoming cooling shutdown and the impacts it might have on your experiments.
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University & Research Facilities has asked us to share the following information regarding a shutdown of the Medical Research Building (MRB) from June 24-26:
- All central cooling for the MRB will be taken offline on Friday evening, the 24th at 9pm, and is planned to come back online on Sunday evening at 10pm.
- This shutdown is required to complete the building infrastructure upgrade to improve overall building cooling and efficiency.
- Portable cooling units will be available to support critical functions within the building.
- There will be a general purpose meeting for all those who wish to attend and get complete project information at the end of the week, time and location yet to be determined.
- Any and all critical labs that require cooling during the shutdown should contact Carl Gioia to arrange for temporary cooling during the shutdown.
Stay tuned—more information coming soon.
I really can’t understand why, repeatedly, there is so little direct communication with occupants of buildings when there are events like this that impact our work. It should be so easy to send an automatic mass email to all occupants! If not for just now encountering this post by chance, I might not have known about the outage, in time to accomodate for my work.
I work in MRB and never saw a single notice for the forum scheduled for yesterday.
I need to know to what extent the cooling outage will affect cold rooms, animal care rooms, and fish colony rooms.
I manage a zebrafish room in MRB and this is the first I’ve heard about this shutdown (after the forum date unfortunately).
Will the cooling shutdown affect heat regulation in general? Our fishroom is maintained at ~80F.
Will there be monitoring in place to track animal rooms during this time- or am I now expected to be on call this weekend to track this change and to track the system coming back online correctly?
Hi Jocelyn,
At the open forum yesterday, there were representatives from the Department of Comparative Medicine, several labs, and department administration and staff who are responsible for the MRB labs to ask these very questions and make sure everything is covered. The answer is yes, the temperature in all the animal rooms will be monitored closely. We are not expecting anyone to have to be on call.
Hi there,
For all involved, this has been a very fast-moving process–including the scheduling of the forum. But, as noted in the response to Jocelyn, the animal rooms will be carefully monitored for temperature fluctuations.
Regarding e-mail to occupants of buildings. . . . for many reasons, it’s not as simple as it might seem to know who lives in what building at any given time. Until we have that kind of electronic capacity, face-to-face meetings can be very efficient for troubleshooting.
The reply from Ms Dresbeck is unfortunately still unresponsive to most of the concerns raised here so far.
Actually we were assured, as part of the review of the recent chemical spill incident in MRB, that such building-specific emails were not only possible but were to be implemented. If in fact this is still not feasible then we need to visit once again the preparedness plan for a chemical spill or other emergency.
This is really basic ITG stuff here! It should be simple to link email address to primary physical address. This is already a field in Smart Web/Outlook Address directory. Provide a simple link for employees to update their preferred physical location identifier, if they change locations.
The ongoing HVAC work in MRB is a major upgrade project involving a large crew and extensive planning. Effective advance communication to all affected parties should be a part of that plan.
Can you tell me who is the “department” administration in charge in MRB? This building contains labs from many departments, and to my knowledge, there is no single building administrator or liaison. If there is, they have never once contacted my lab nor asked me what the needs of my lab are, in order to adequately represent me in a meeting.
You have assured us that “animal” rooms will be monitored. However, does that in fact include fish rooms that are not part of Comparative Med facilities? You were not clear.
Also I ask again, what will be the impact if any on cold rooms? And will the outage also affect air flow from chemical fume hoods and tissue culture hoods? This information is vital.