Trustees at the University of South Alabama have signed off on a $520,000 study aimed at mapping out how the Mobile campus will maintain and eventually replace its aging buildings, water pipes and electrical systems over the next decade.
University officials plan to bring in outside engineers and infrastructure specialists to conduct the review in the coming months, according to the school’s vice president for financial affairs, who told trustees that after 50 years of operation, campus systems are increasingly starting to show their age.
Sinkholes and Aging Pipes
The need for a broader study has become more apparent as problems have surfaced even in some of the campus’s newer buildings. A stormwater drain beneath the university’s activity center, which opened in 1999, collapsed roughly six months earlier after decades of gradual deterioration and had to be replaced.
At a June 5 meeting of the board’s facilities committee, administrators presented photos of sinkholes that had opened up in areas such as University Commons, caused by leaking steel pipes installed without proper insulation three to four decades ago. The campus’s electrical distribution system is facing similar issues, with roughly 60 percent of its cable now older than 30 years, well beyond the industry’s typical 25-year life expectancy. Many flat roofs on older buildings were also described as past their expected service life.
The planned study will also examine the university’s centralized chilled-water system, which was installed in the mid-1960s under the direction of the school’s founding president. Rather than equip every building with its own heating and cooling equipment, the university built a central plant that chills water and distributes it campus-wide for air conditioning, a design officials credit with saving substantial energy and operating costs over the decades. Administrators noted that the approach, unusual for its time, has since been adopted by many other universities as an efficient and environmentally friendly model.
The infrastructure assessment is expected to evaluate the campus’s current capacity and future needs, develop a prioritized list of replacement projects, project how demand will grow as the university expands, and produce a ten-year financial plan to guide future capital spending. University leaders say the goal is to get ahead of costly emergency repairs by planning systematically for the replacement of pipes, cable and roofing before they fail.