PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 20, No. 14, Feb. 15, 2001

Abbott back to routine after January explosion

Craig Chamberlain, News Bureau Staff Writer
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@illinois.edu

The UI’s Abbott Power Plant is back to fairly routine operation following a Jan. 26 explosion and fire that cut power and steam heat to much of the campus, says Terry Ruprecht, chief facilities officer for the campus.

Key pieces of electrical equipment destroyed or damaged in the incident have yet to be replaced, Ruprecht said, but other equipment and systems that were temporarily sidelined have been brought back into service.

Among those were coal-fired boilers that had to be shut down because electrical power was not available for their operation. Also, a second main electrical feed from the plant to the campus has been re-energized after it was rendered unusable on the day of the fire.

Cost estimates on the damage to the plant were not yet available from the insurance company earlier this week, Ruprecht said. But staff with the Operation and Maintenance Division have estimated that the cost of replacing five switch-gear enclosures damaged in the explosion and fire is in the range of $400,000, he said.

It was in one of those enclosures where the explosion occurred about 8:20 a.m. on Jan. 26, "almost undoubtedly" as the result of a current arc in a large circuit breaker, Ruprecht said.

The explosion and resulting fire required the shutdown of electric power running through the plant, as well as the shutdown of the steam system. This left probably three-quarters of campus buildings without electricity and almost all campus buildings without steam for heating.

Electric power was returned to some of the affected buildings within about three hours, steam was flowing again by mid-afternoon, and power was completely restored to the campus shortly before midnight through the efforts of O&M engineers, craftspersons and power-plant staff.

Ruprecht said he had received no reports of serious damage or loss outside of the plant as a result of the power outage, including research areas. "We know of no major losses in animal areas," he said, and no major losses had been reported due to loss of power to low-temperature storage units.

But in the case of low-temperature storage, "I have heard about an awful lot of time and effort and cooperation between research units" to avoid such losses, he said.

The outage may have served as a wake-up call for some units that either thought they had access to backup generators or hadn’t considered the need, Ruprecht said. "The silver lining to this was that we had become somewhat complacent due to a lack of major power outages. But as a result of this, people on both the facility side and on the research side are looking much harder at their operations and the availability of emergency power."

As for avoiding similar incidents in the future, Ruprecht said, that should be taken care of through plans for the plant that were already under way. The university administration and O&M staff are planning an addition to Abbott that will replace a lot of older equipment and increase the plant’s generating capacity. Work on the plant could begin within the next 12 months, and be complete within three years, he said.

"By two to three years from now, this wouldn’t have happened, because we would have had mostly new equipment in there," he said.