USU expands underground tunnels
The two plus miles of tunnels under USU are getting even longer.
USU Facilities began two building construction projects in June of 2016. These projects consist of building a new housing complex to replace Valley View Tower and a new Clinical Services Building.
The construction sites are located next to Valley View Tower and on the east side of the Edith Bowen Elementary School. The tunnels will connect these two buildings to the rest of the tunnel system.
The expansion of the maintenance tunnels is taking place between both of these construction sites. One entrance to the tunnels is in the basement of the Center for Persons with Disabilities. The construction continues down there as crews work to reroute the heating and cooling pipes for the other two projects. The tunnels will connect to the two new buildings to the existing passages, which extend as far as from the Central Energy Plant to Old Main and Ray B. West. This is over two miles that can be traced aboveground fairly easily.
As students walk around campus, they will have surely noticed the cement blocks with large, noisy grates underneath them. These provide ventilation for the maintenance tunnels. They help regulate the temperature inside the tunnels, keeping them at a nice 72-78 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, as well as keeping the air from becoming stagnant underground.
The idea for these tunnels was proposed back in the late 90s due to the issues that came with repairing pipelines buried beneath and between the many buildings on campus. The infrastructure was in pretty bad shape, all of the boilers were over 50 years old, and as pipes were being dug up and replaced, the Facilities director and associates knew that they needed to update the plant.
The Central Energy Plant was moved from where the LLC buildings are now to its current home between Maverik Stadium and the Spectrum. The tunnel project began in 2001 and was completed in 2002. These tunnels run heating and cooling pipes as well as fiber optics to every building on campus. The University of Utah is now facing similar issues in replacing their facilities, and are considering implementing a tunnel system like the one here.
Reid Olsen, Central Energy Plant Manager, said, “They’re a great way to maintain our utilities up on campus, to make changes and do repairs without having to disrupt anything on campus like we used to,” not to mention the benefits that result from keeping the pipes out of the ground.
One of these benefits is that the lives of the utilities are extended significantly longer than they would otherwise be.
Not many people know about this tunnel system, and according to Olsen, this is a good thing.
“That was the goal — to be able to fix the things we need to without disrupting education,” Olsen said.“We just want to provide our services without getting in the way.”
Both Valley View and Mountain View towers have become outdated in many ways, both aesthetically and structurally, though Valley View is the worse of the two. Stephanie Beuchanan, a resident of Valley View Tower, said the lights flicker a lot and nobody really trusts the elevator enough to use it often, plus there is an old smell hanging around the place.
She also expressed mild frustration with the construction, saying “It’s pretty noisy from about 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. It shakes the whole building sometimes and makes trying to do homework here difficult.”
Overall, she was satisfied with her living situation, despite its current quirks, because it’s all part of making housing at USU better.
As the experts analyzed the towers, it became apparent that it would be more beneficial to create a new housing structure than to upgrade the existing building. As soon as the replacement is up, Valley View will be torn down.
The Clinical Services building will take a little more time to complete. If everything goes according to plan, it will be completed in the middle of November next year. This building will house all of the clinical services on campus.. This centralizing into one building on campus will make it much more convenient to students. This building is going up right next to the Edith Bowen Elementary School.
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