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The Rice Thresher
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A spill of hydrochloric acid on the evening of March 4 resulted in the temporary loss of power for over half of the university.

According to Jim Riley, operations manager of Central Plant, about 200 gallons of HCl was spilled onto the plant floor, as a result of a leaky gasket, during a routine cleaning of one of the boilers.

The resulting spill did not cause any immediate damage to equipment, but a portion of the HCl did flow underneath the electrical gear of the control center. The power outage was necessary so that a crew could, without the danger of electrocution, pull out breakers of the electrical equipment, clean up the spill and repaint some equipment to prevent further corrosion.

The outage, which occurred on the night of March 7, lasted for approximately five hours and affected all of Will Rice, Sid Richardson, Hanszen, Wiess, Baker and Lovett colleges.

According to Riley, the Houston Fire Department was called at one point during the cleaning of the spill when a brief flare-up occurred after some HCl came in contact with an extension cord.

"It's been a major inconvenience, but there was no one injured or hurt," Riley said.

Despite this inconvenience, Central Plant never shut down; monitoring and control equipment were simply relocated to another area during the cleanup, Riley said.

In an unrelated incident, Tuesday morning the Cohen House basement flooded when one of the main sewage lines that serves the Inner Loop areas of campus backed up.

The sewage line, which runs underground from Baker College and around the Inner Loop to Anderson Hall, has an outlet underneath the basement of Cohen House which is where the flooding began.

"There was a blockage in the sewer that runs under College Way, which Cohen House['s line] flows into," Russel Price, Facilities and Engineering maintenance manager, said. They had to pay a high-pressure vacuum sewer truck to clear out the pocket of grease that was causing the blockage. According to Price, the blockage was cleared by Tuesday afternoon.

Student waiters noticed the flooding around 10:30 a.m. when they attemped to enter the dressing rooms before their lunch shifts.

Brown College freshman Amanda Mortl, one of the student waiters, said, "It didn't inconvenience me, but I thought it was extremely foul."

This item appeared in the News section of the March 14, 1997 issue.