The steam released from the ground all over campus may stink, but we’d all smell worse without it.
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Behind the Stamp Student Union, in the middle of the engineering athletic fields, next to the South Campus Dining Hall — what do these locations have in common? A foul odor associated with the gently billowing water vapor that emerges from what the university’s assistant to the director of operations and maintenance David Cosner calls “steam vaults.”
These vaults are located all over campus, in fact, “every approximately 300 to 400 feet we have to have a vault,” Cosner said.
These vaults house miles of valves and piping which is used to transport steam created by the university’s Central Heating and Power Plant. The steam provides electricity for the campus and cools its buildings.
“We actually use steam to produce cold water for air conditioning at Comcast [Center] and at a building called SCUB 4,” Cosner said.
The steam housed in Satellite Central Utility Building 4 alone is powerful enough to cool a total of 16 facilities on campus, including the Chemistry and Jeong Kim Engineering buildings.
But, according to Cosner, that mysterious “steam” that you see billowing out of manholes and vents all over campus is actually water vapor created when cold groundwater touches the hot valves housed in the steam vaults. The rotten smell is from all of the natural minerals and elements in the groundwater, he said.
So the next time you catch yourself grumbling about the suspicious-smelling cloud you have to walk through to get to your next class, just remember that without that vicious vapor, you’d be headed toward a sweltering classroom instead of the cool relief of air conditioning.
-By Julie Baughman